Slashdot Mirror
Japan Plans $21B Space Power Plant
Mike writes "Japan has announced plans to send a $21 billion solar power generator into space that will be capable of producing one gigawatt of energy, or enough to power 294,000 homes. The project recently received support from Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp, who are now teaming up in the race to develop new technology within four years that can beam electricity back to Earth without the use of cables. Japan hopes to test a small solar satellite decked out with solar panels by the year 2015."
... of a recession in June? They must be high on life now ... spend spend away!
I suggest using intelligent robots to manage the Space Power Plant.
Of course, you need to be careful that they don't develop their own religion...
No sig for the moment.
not impressed
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
21 Billion for 1 measly Gigawatt?
Plus maintenance?
Orbiting power stations the beam power are inefficient and way too costly.
There is also the risk that they will get struck by space debris.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... of putting a solar array in space? Would it not be easier to maintain here on earth? Obviously no clouds up in space, 24 hours of sun, but the costs seem to outweigh the benefits. Plus, I would imagine an extensive amount of loss transferring energy down to earth.
Existence is futile
I could understand it if the energy was to be used to man space stations, but the cost of getting that energy back down to earth must surely outweigh any benefit from having the panels in space... assuming, of course that there is any such benefit.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
To avoid repeating myself...
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/space-power/
How much to fire it at someone? :D
Fixed that for you.
Kurt Vonnegut: "If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind."
I wonder how many of things are planned to be up and running in the near future.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/06/25/138207/Beamed-Space-Solar-Power-Plant-To-Open-In-2016
If you are about to post anything about any of the issues below, please at least read the Wiki page on SBSP first. Doing so will save a lot of electrons.
A basic understanding of the technology and physics will debunk all of these, and WikiPedia gives a good overview of these non-criticisms. Anyone continuing to parrot them below will be flogged.
Not a typewriter
"Warning! Microwave beam targeting error!"
"AIIEE! IT STINGS AND BURNS!!"
Please don't miss with that beam...
The DOD, as well as FEMA, should be pushing to have several built for the America. This would actually enable more private launches, but also give the DOD a means to bring energy into areas that they need. Transportation of fuel is EXPENSIVE. The ability to bring power into a hurricane hit area will enable quick power. More importantly, the ability to beam energy will have to be developed. That would enable many of our construction and open pit mining vehicles to move off diesel. Basically, that would help to drive new innovations.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A better way of understanding about how much power this will supply is to compare it to other plants. Using that sort of measurement this will be about moderately sized. For example the Mohave Power Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohave_Power_Station is slightly larger (I think) than normal for for a coal plant and produced 1.5 gigawatts. Another useful comparison is to look at how much it will cost (assuming it stays at budget). Under that metric this looks like it is orders of magnitude more expensive than conventional plants. Presumably that cost will go down as this technology becomes more common.
An Ion Cannon you say?
Over $71k per household? I sure hope they have a plan that ends up with better economics. This thing smells suspiciously like one of those projects that doesn't make sense to anyone except the companies that are using taxpayer cash to do the work.
Once this is in place, my plan will come to fruition! I will threated to launch disco balls into the power beam unless Japan pays me... *pinky to mouth* one million dollars!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
or one Delorean
Im not sure about this approach to get energy from out of the earth and then injecting it in. This bubble we have here has its own equilibrium and energy invariably turns into heat.... what can happen enviromentally when you inject heat that wouldnt otherwise have gotten in?
NO SIG
Seriously, couldn't they push it and get that last 0.21 GigaWatt out so we can use it for time travel?
Especially since Japanese homes tend to be much smaller and much more energy efficient than US homes, which might embarrass us into thinking about conservation. Horrors!
21000000000 / 294000 = 71428.5714
or about $5952.40
Man and I thought my power bill was bad for the month of August at $397.89 for the month.
Gotta love that green energy.
Japan is an island nation. You could someone minimize the risk of injury or loss of (human) life by directing the beat to a receiver on some micro-island, or maybe a floating platform like an oil rig, then have cables run from the island/platform to mainland Japan. That way, if the satellite goes a *little* off target, it's not as likely to people (although it still might harm aquatic life, I suppose, though I bet the potential damage and the risks are less than the damage from an oil platform/pipe/ship accident).
I didn't think it could work but after looking at the picture in the article I can see it will be powerful enough. That satellite is almost twice as big as the Earth!
I may be wrong but I think the important thing to remember is that they are paying $21 billion for the development of this space power power plant. If history tells us anything about innovation it's that innovation is costly, but the rewards can be great. Once they get this off the ground, how much will the next one cost? And the one after that? That's the important issue.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
Comments sent from the future in Japan:
It was like Godzilla came to life. I mean flames shooting from the sky, buildings colapsing in fire, people screaming, ...
It was a subtle miscalculation, it could have happened to anybody... ...looking for the owners of the power platform, who have mysteriously disappeared...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
They use it to power their giant mechs instead.
AccountKiller
Would it be feasible to put solar collectors outside of earths orbit which in turn transmit to earth orbiting satalties that then relay down.
Could we put something closer to the Sun and leap from back to earth more effeciently than solar winds do?
I recall watching a documentary on Tesla that discusses a lot of things Tesla did including using fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field to create electric power. I also recall that his backer/investor or whoever he was (a famous banker I think... got a bank named after him even now but just can't think of the name) said he wouldn't back any research that wouldn't make him a lot of money and so killed the line research.
I think it's about time some "open source" minded group of people pick up where Tesla left off.
havent i sceen this before on a epasode of Gundam?>
I see that someone tagged this story "fried". Well, no.
The microwave beam from a solar power satellite is not strong enough to fry things. It's stronger than sunlight but not scary strong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Safety
The land used for a power-receiving rectenna can still be used for raising cattle, without the cattle becoming super-powered mutants or getting cooked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Earth-based_infrastructure
It remains to be seen when this will prove to be economical. It's not economical today, but if they start working on it today, maybe we will have many profitable powersats orbiting Earth within, say, 30 years. (Just in time for nuclear fusion, right?)
The good thing about this is that it doesn't require any new technology. We can do this with just some engineering. The biggest problem with this is that launch costs are currently astronomical to send anything to orbit; but I think that we are going to see a renaissance in space launch systems. Surely one of the private space companies (Armadillo Aerospace, SpaceX, Scaled Composites, etc.) will get a practical reusable launch system to work; and that will completely change the game for launch costs.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Those poor Japanese get screwed every which way but loose. They have been conditioned to pay $60 for a melon, and now $21 billion for something that will never work. And they don't complain!
Think of this more as a big wet kiss for the Japanese space industry. Just like "Star Wars" was for our military-industrial complex.
There's no way in heck this will ever get within a factor of 100 of being practical or economical.
You know if you ignore the maintenance the cost is almost fine
Other space born generators are expecting a 15 year life cycle (according to that article ) or about 131400 hours.
So that means a total output of 131400000000 Kilowatts
21Billion/131.4Billion = 0.16$ per kilowatt hour
And guess what the cost of electricity is in Japan... about 0.16$ per kilowatt hour
http://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb/japan.html
Too bad about the maintenance.
Japan, 2015, orbital power stations and no mention of Gundam?
I must be really old.
Focused energy beam coming down from space is called a Lightning Strike ! Nature already figured out all fuel transportation issues and devised lightning for us :)
"The Agricultural Ministry is Not in Charge of Gundam"
Wow! Go Japan! This project would not only further develop space based technology but also would support politically correct green energy production needs. Space based power might actually benefit mankind, as opposed to exploring Mars! Why can't the U.S. come up with space projects which are actually practical? I can just see the next James Bond movie - where the bad guy gets fried by a space-beam of microwaves.....
What are they doing in their homes to use 3.4 KW average? An individual house could easily peak at that, but averaged together? In the midwest that would be at least a $200 electric bill, or more like $600+ in coastie-land. I usually pay like $50 to $75, and I have plenty of electronic hardware. Do they each have a home aluminum refinery in every basement, like the Chinese tried to have a steel mill in every backyard during the great leap forward? Charge batteries for giant robots?
I understand they don't have mcmansions over there, so even a grow operation would be too small to use that much electricity...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What are the chances this has military applications? The energy output seems relatively insignificant for the cost. But the capability of "beaming" this much energy to earth strikes me as useful from a strategic standpoint.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I don't see how this could possibly go wrong. Environmentalist question: What effect will sending all of this energy through the atmosphere have on the o-zone layer?
About the debris: Put some LASERS in it then...
Jeeze, this people lack imagination.
NO SIG
but it takes a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.12 GIGAWATTS!!!
$21B for some fucking spacepower crap while a new wave of homeless on the streets of Tokyo.
That's what's called service to power and wealth.
This was the best powerplant in Sim City 2000. You launched a satellite to that would beam energy back down to your big dish plant. The best part is when it missed and fried the terrain around it.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
That's what I call cloud computing! Beaming a gigawatt of power in microwaves from space... what could go wrong? :)
Seriously though, how is it that Japan is going to spend 21 billion to beam a gigawatt of power from space, but I still can't get wireless power for my laptop?
They already made that James Bond movie
Before "Die Another Day" there was "Moonraker".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What kind of capacity factor are they using to come up with only 294,000 homes? Typically, 1MW ~= 1000 homes, unless you're talking about some power source with a low capacity factor (like say 30% for wind power). I'd assume that the capacity factor for SBSP would be 100%, and therefore we're talking about being able to power 1,000,000 homes.
How far off are we being able to speak of income in terms of Joules? Further off beat than my comment? Perhaps, but quips about the 'Electric Universe' aside, Joules may be a feasible accounting convention. Everything can be viewed as value added and, therefore, unfortunately, taxed. We use money to measure value in trade, but, money is subject to any number of quick and dirty fixes. Joules OTOH may be the best way to measure wealth. The Japanese are very typical of other historical island peoples with limited amounts of arable land and the drive and ability to innovate. My guess is they make such a venture pay off in the long run. Yes, Keynes quipped, in the long run we're all dead.
ideopath @ play
Hmm, someone forgot to tell them that the launch costs will be 42 trillion dollars... Maybe they should work on a space elevator first.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
HVDC is expensive, but it's technology we have now. All this could be done without one iota of new science. (not that new science is bad, it's just unpredictable)
because i had my own death ray curiosities about this, i admit sheepishly. From the wikipedia article, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power":
"A commonly proposed approach to ensuring fail-safe beam targeting is to use a retrodirective phased array antenna/rectenna. A "pilot" microwave beam emitted from the center of the rectenna on the ground establishes a phase front at the transmitting antenna. There, circuits in each of the antenna's subarrays compare the pilot beam's phase front with an internal clock phase to control the phase of the outgoing signal. This forces the transmitted beam to be centered precisely on the rectenna and to have a high degree of phase uniformity; if the pilot beam is lost for any reason (if the transmitting antenna is turned away from the rectenna, for example) the phase control value fails and the microwave power beam is automatically defocused.[56] Such a system would be physically incapable of focusing its power beam anywhere that did not have a pilot beam transmitter."
of course, maybe someone can make their own "overriding" pilot beam, and use it to give slightly better tans to guests on a luxury beach or something (eeeeviilll). This system is tight and I like it, being someone who never thought about it.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
"I honestly don't know what the heck is going on in the US!"
If you just woke up from a coma, America went through 8 years of voodoo economics, record deficit spending by a runaway congress, a jobless recovery, and an economy propped up with record low interest rates that lead to a housing bubble. Combine that with a failure to monitor the largest financial institutions because of an ideological aversion to regulation, and you have a perfect financial storm.
Meanwhile, Americas's financial frenemies are exploiting an arbitrage on labor and environmental costs, along with currency manipulation and protectionism, to supercharge their economies.
Now that you're up to date, we have a new American President who is not beholden to special interests, especially energy interests, who has some vision for a clean energy future. Japan has just announced a bold new project to generate photovoltaic energy and some Americans are very curious.
All of that was sardonic. What do you not understand?
Best regards.
Mitsubishi corp is in charge of Gundam?
Just put a total of 200 square mile of arrays of mirrors into the deadest deserts and place on earth, let them heat water, drive turbines, and lead the power to us with DC cables. Tadaa: Enough energy for the whole world!
It's easy to build, needs no rare or non-renewable materials, does not destroy any living nature (except if you consider things like salt flats living nature), is relatively cheap in building and maintenance... what more do you need?
If you have to do it in space: The same thing works there too. You just have even more problems getting the power here. But what's the point?
If i ever make big time money, I'll invest half of it in such a power plant, and the other half in an army of soldiers and lobbyists, to protect it from a specific group of greedy bastards.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I've played with this technology before and thing's didn't go so well. I was the mayor a city and we had a few hundred thousand people in it. Let's call them "Sims" to protect their identity. They were all bitching about how coal polluted the atmosphere and such. So one day after I was lounging around in my mayor's office this guy called me up and said "hey you should try this microwave energy stuff, it doesn't pollute." So I dropped some coin on this new technology, and everyone loved me.
That is, until the beam got out of alignment and fried half of the town. Then a huge robot showed up and finished off the rest of the town. And just to add insult to injury, an 8.0 earth quake hit and swallowed up what was left of the city.
Let that be a lesson to anyone who might want to try this technology.
Have you actually read that page? It reads like a sci-fi novel written by a highschool kid on acid. The stuff dealing with beaming the power around is all well and good, until you get to this parts about building 10km in diameter ground based antennas, and how 30 of them combined with armies of robot-moon-miners supplying clouds of 100 square kilometer solar panels floating in space might not contribute to global warming.
I'm sorry, but am I seriously supposed to believe that when we have all of that we are still going to be worried about warming the globe?
Vacuum of space == no way to dissipate heat? 1GW is a lot of energy, and I'm assuming the energy conversion isn't 100% efficient.... Is there somebody here with a better understanding of thermal physics explain how they might get rid of the waste heat?
What Could Go Wrong!!!
Same unit floating off the coast 2 billion dollars
What will Japan's power consumption be in 10 to 20 years? They're having so few kids the population should be plummeting soon.
We don't need more power, Mr. Scotty. We need FEWER PEOPLE. Pollution would be less of a problem if there were fewer people creating it. Cutting emissions, conserving and finding cleaner sources of energy while all very good... won't mean shit if our growth is still horrifically out of control. With a smaller population we'd have more resources per person and less waste generated.
Similarly, there are no food or water shortages... there ARE places of the world that that too many people for the available resources. If we have 1 gallon per person per day at a population of 100,000... we'd have 2 gallons per person per day if the population of 50,000.
i'm not talking about killing off people or even letting them die. i'm talking about getting the population to something that is sustainable. The quantity of life is going to start seriously farking with our quality of life... and THEN with the quantity. If we don't get it under control we're going to have more wars, more droughts, more everything that sucks.
"easier said than done"
Really? No kidding! Can i have your autograph before you win the Nobel Prize for Pointing out the Obvious?
"But that's mean"
Mean is kids dying of starvation because their parents had too many kids. Mean will be wars over water.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Far too many ppl here assume that new advancements are cheaper than what they replace. What many fail to realize is that most of the big ideas were actually funded by federal levels. For example, the early railroads as well as roads in the USA were done by the feds. Likewise, the same is true of our coal and even nuke power plants. Just several days ago, I had a guy who was carping that I was pushing for space mining. For his POV it was all about TODAY's ECONOMIC issues. From my POV, it has always been about access to minerals and elements. Far too many of what we use in small quantities is from several countries that are not friendly to the west. In fact, that day, I found an article where Japan is very concerned that CHina is about to stop selling critical rare earth minerals, which at this time, they have a near monopoly on. It is possible that China will prevent other nations from having similar access to the cheap minerals.
What is needed is clear far thinking by our politicians. We had a great run of those back in the 30-70's, but have had several horrible presidents (reagan and W) combined with far too many decades of corrupt congresses.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
GoldenEye
We need 1.21 gigawatts to power the flux capacitor.
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
TOKYO - Residents have reported that giant reptile, Godzilla, was just struck down and apparently killed by a misdirected microwave beam from Japan's orbiting power generation satellite. The giant lizard fell in a residential area and caused substantial damage. Hundreds of people are missing and presumed dead.
The Greenpeace and the International Humane Society have issued a joint statement criticizing the Japanese government for allowing their satellite to destroy the last specimen of this endangered species.
Godzilla had a long history of appearing in Japanese cities, and often caused much damage with each visit. Typically, the creature appeared when some other monstrous threat appeared. Apart from the Windows 7 launch in Tokyo, no one is aware of any significant events that would have drawn the creature to the city.
Because of his history as a destructive source, many people are glad to see the death of the giant lizard. A representative of the Japanese tourism ministry, however, is reported to have said that, "Godzilla's passing will have a profound affect on the people of Japan, and upon the Japanese tourist economy."
Japanese street vendor, Aido Hawishinna, witnessed the event and reported, "It hit the buildings as it fell, and crashed just beyond my stand. It smells like baked fish. I wanted to be the first merchant in the city to sell Godzilla-burgers, but the police and army will not let me harvest the meat before it spoils."
The Japanese government, in an official statement issued hours after the incident, announced that it plans to conduct an autopsy on the remains, to determine if Godzilla's death was related to problems on the orbital microwave power platform.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Send down energy from the orbit without cable... I wonder if there is a way to be sure...
Damn, I wish this wasn't Japan. My apology.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. They've got ELECTROLYTES.
What an entire discussion and no one has brought up the SOL gun from Akira?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I could be mistaken, but isn't the cost of this power plant versus a nuclear power plant (which many people argue is the cheapest form of electricity to produce) over 3 times more?
Space-based power isn't susceptible to earthquakes. Nuclear power plants are. Japan has a lot of earthquakes.
Once you have the know-how you could also build units for other countries and beam power down to them. And you wouldn't have to worry about the proliferation of fissile materials (a la Iran).
$21B for 294,000 homes.
,a href="http://www.stat.go.jp/english/index/official/207.htm">
Japan has 46,862,900 occupied homes. So, 46862900 divided by 294,000 is roughly 160. So, 160 x $21B = $3.36 TRILLION.
Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen.
RS
This one is way past due, IMHO.
.
The USA, it seems, can only think the NASA party line. To whit, "Let's go to [Insert useless gravity well]! It's cool! We can do scientific research! Hooray!"
.
Frankly the lot of them at NASA seem to have their heads so far up their collective behinds, I'm shocked they can see the light of day.
.
Space technology is here. Not great. Not cheap, but it's here. Instead of little academia circle jerks and the folks who want to go to Mars because [insert costly impractical reason here], we *could* be building power stations, living environments, zero g manufacturing facilities, etc. in orbit now, with private backing.
.
In short, there's *money* to be made out there in near Earth orbit. Energy money. Technology money. Non-bubble money. Right now, of course, it's much more expensive to put up a space based solar energy generator than a nuclear plant, however nuclear fuel is limited. Sunlight isn't. Who makes the bucks when the bean counters finally work that one out? It's a long term investment - the kind of thing Japan does well.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I guess nothing prevents them from beaming down the energy using a single one inch thick laser.
we have a new American President who is not beholden to special interests, especially energy interests,
Maybe not energy interests, but if he wasn't on the take from media interests he would have cut the US out of ACTA negotiations by now, especially since he was talking all about transparency and making himself out to be a technophile during his campaign (so much for that). He's also made a habit of appointing RIAA lawyers to his administration.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Ok, if my math is correct then isn't this ridiculously expensive? Maybe we should, oh I dunno put the solar panels on people's roofs? Or better yet, use nuclear power which is cheaper and produces no C02? I realize you get a benefit by getting direct sunlight 24/7 in space, but there still needs to be some sort of cost/benefit analysis done here.
No Sigs!
That seems like it would adequately prevent accidents. However, how do we ensure that no intentional redirects can be used to turn the thing into a weapon?
Let's go Hollywood for a moment and consider worst case scenario. "The terrorists" manage to a) hack into the command and control for the satellite and change the orientation of the antenna, and b) place a secondary pilot beam transmitter at the new 'target' (so that the 'fail safe' finds what it expects to find - a focusing beam in the correct phase)? I know, it sounds like the plot to a movie, but, what makes it impossible?
This may be a stupid question (if so, you may flame away), but if a given country or business interest were to launch such a satellite, what would stop another country or business from "stealing" the energy from the satellite (I mean, building their own receiving station on the ground and intercepting the microwave beam for themselves)?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You americans, you think the Japanese will let you get away with the bombing of it's cities and the public humiliation suffered by Emperor ShÅwa and the great japanese Peoples.
Here, the Japanese Empire is getting yet another step closer to world domination while all eyes are focused on the petty Iranian nuclear program.
Once the orbital laser cannon goes online, all will bow to the new, Japanese overlords.
Just wait till the Pyscios Greens get hold of this. Here we are pumping in Gig Watts of energy into the bio-shere from space, energy that ultimately becomes heat in the atmosphere, adding to global [cooling] warming. Hey a new thing to tax! The Radiant Energy Tax, new and improved over the Carbon Tax.
Yep, now that I think about it a bit, this is probably about the export potential of having a new green power technology tried and tested just when the world really starts looking for options.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
size of the slingshot they intend to use to accomplish this?
It generates 1 Gigawatt. Lets just assume this is 24 hours per day, for the life of the system.
Divide the cost by the benefit and you get $21 per watt delivered. Since the customers are paying (for the sake of convenience) $0.21 per kilowatt-hour, it will take about 100,000 hours to pay for the thing. Inflation, like maintenance, is cost free. Thus the system is fully paid in about 11.4 years.
How long did Hubble go before it needed major servicing and a basic rebuild? And it wasn't nearly as complicated as a power plant and microwave death ray transmission path.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
The whole space-based power thing is just a science geek's wet dream. It will never happen. You might as well forget about a world powered by wind, sunlight, tides, ocean waves, algae, corn, sugar cane, etc. All that stuff is excruciatingly primitive and will not succeed in the long run.
The amazing truth is that, like fish in the ocean, we are swimming in wall-to-wall energy but we can't see it. Why? Because we are blinded by our current assumptions about how bodies really move. Soon though, all that will change because not everybody is making the same assumptions about motion. A few mavericks are thinking deep thoughts. Get ready for the age of infinite free energy and true zero emissions.
Nasty Little Truth About Motion
Even the hardest sciences are subject to healthy dispute that can be unhealthily portrayed as though there are two equal and opposite positions.
Ah, the wedge issue ID supporters try to have included in education as regards evolution.
Oh, let me get this too:
The argument global warming deniers
Scientifically it's not Global Warming that a concern, it's Climate Change. While record highs are being recorded in the Pacific Northwest, such as in Seattle, this seems like the coolest summer I can recall in the Minneapolis, St Paul, twin cities area in the 10 years I've been here.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I don't have mod points today, but I did follow the poster's link. I think the proper moderation would be -1 Crackpot as opposed to -1 Troll, but as the poster says, "Soon, though, all that will change!"
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
WHAT THE HELL IS A GIGAWATT?
If the announcement is based on actual technical calculations (as opposed to getting-a-government-grant calculations or news-reporter-misinterpreted calculations), they're expecting the system will produce power for $21/watt (including research & development costs) - so $21K/kwh. At $0.10/kwh, that means they'd need to run for 210k hours to break even, which is unlikely; even at $0.30/kWh that'd be 70K hours, or a bit under 9 years.
On the other hand, if that's $16B for R&D and $5B for production of a reproducible solution (unlikely?) that's closer to viable.
I think the big question is the power transmission part; solar panel technology is improving, and presumably part of the research is how to develop cheaper launch capabilities.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Never mind, it took me a while to find the part about power density.
At least you post with what seems to be your real name, which may take a little bit of gonads. Not what I really would call identifying oneself though, as I'm sure there are many Bill Stewarts out there.
Everybody knows who I am as I am not afraid of expressing my ideas but who are YOU, really? What have you done that someone can associate you with? If you're going to attack me ad hominem, I want to know who you are so I can prepare a proper defense.
It needs to be said again, regardless.
IT'S A GUNDAM!
*explodes*
$21000000000/294000 homes=71428.57 per household.
That's just launch costs, right? Then you have yearly costs to keep the thing operational. Anyway, $71k over 50 years is $1428 a year not accounting for inflation or yearly costs.
Wow. I'm all for the idea, but the costs just make it seem wasteful. Put $21 billion solar panel and wind farms into production instead.
Wind also doesn't scale as easily - you're not taking transmission costs into account
Even nuclear has to be transmitted and so has a cost too. Of course adding solar, wind, and other sources of power to the grid will mean the grid has to be rebuilt and made smart. However according to "Rebuilding the Power Grid" problems related to the grid and power quality costs the US $80 Billion to $180 billion a year. If so then it only makes sense to rebuild the grid, and businesses are working on that. Xcel Energy is working on the Smart City Grid for instance. What stands in the way of a smart grid is government. It's not simple, well physically it is but not politically, to erect transmission lines from where the power is produced to where it's used. There are all the property owners as well as governments, from cities, counties, and states to deal with.
Then when you also add in heavy transmission line costs, you also get to deal with rights of way and environmental impact studies for that entire transmission line route, etc, etc.
As stated above that applies to nuclear power as well. It applies to all sources of electricity including coal and gas fired powerplants. The fact you're only applying it to wind shows you're biased against wind.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
At $21B, this thing has a return on investment time of more than 50 years if you don't count interest. If you do, it's probably better to just put the dollars or yens into the solid fuel rocket tanks and fire away and go on with your life. Any how, this explains why Japan national debt is 180% of their GDP. Their industry is just taking the government to the cleaners.
They could also use that money to invest in CSP, wind, and tidal power.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Next time when you guys will try to piss off Japan, you may get the heat back!
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
The ability to bring power into a hurricane hit area will enable quick power.
And how would the power be delivered? Any ground station would be damaged..
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
you fail at logic
The Mohave Power Station luckily was shut down. The Black Mesa aquifer was being pumped dry to pump coal mined at Black Mesa in a slurry to the power station.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What effect will SBSP on passing-by satellites and high-altitude airplanes?
politicians. We had a great run of those back in the 30-70's
What? Like the politicians who prolonged the Great Depression?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"who wouldn't want it?"
Personally, me. I'd rather have a hybrid system of solar panels, wind turbines, and maybe microhydro to power my home. And vehicles. Now space based solar power could make sense for a moon base, but then again the atmosphere isn't as thick there so CSP, Concentrated Solar Power, may be better.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
And they could power Doc Brown's DeLorean.
So, this means that we let Japan put a 300 MW microwave transmitter in orbit, a transmitter that can be aimed anywhere the Japanese choose. I don't think that's wise.
It's particularly worrisome because, from the point of energy generation, space based power is extremely expensive--meaning that any country that moves to space based power generation may have hidden motives.
You need to keep in mind that Japan doesn't have all the land needed to deploy hundred of wind turbines.
Thus, it is oddly appropriate that Japan is at the right latitude to send
machinery into the jet stream. There, the wind is strong enough, it might not
take hundreds of turbines. One needs only enough land area for a
good anchor (come to that, sea area would do as well), and a good-sized
kite to maneuver into the strongest flow.
Just what a nation with no natural fuel resources, beyond wood and bamboo, needs: A huge, undefendable, centralized piece of critical infrastructure sitting right where everyone on the planet can reach it.
Never mind the technological arguments for and against it. The logistical ones should stop it in its tracks.
Go ahead Japan, build it. Then piss off just one nut case, like Korea, Libya, or whoever else has, or is close to being able to, lob a ballistic rock into orbit.
These huge, centralized, monolithic technological marvels that claim to be the answers to various problems all have the same vulnerability. They can be taken out by one pissed off caveman with a good throwing arm.
Haven't the lessons given by the failure of every centralized planning scheme in history taught us anything?
Why continue to ignore the lessons of evolution, free markets and decentralization?
Wait, sorry, I forgot. These are Homo Sap's we are talking about.
It will produce a Gigawatt of power.
21 Billion... 294,000 homes... is $71,428.58 per home
google Calc: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLC_enUS312US312&q=21+billion+%2F+294000
Now, $71,428.58 Per home / 20 years = $3,741.43 PER YEAR COST OF SPACE ENERGY!
YIKES! REALLY!! PASS...
20 Years life expectancy of solar cells guessed at because of various googles and the chance of an astroid taking the whole thing out... and then you'd have to reinvest the next $21Billion for the next batch..
If it went longer than 20 years, it would lower costs, but not it is really too much of an outlay for 294,000 homes. quick lookup gives me around $600-700/yr... So that is like 5 times what I pay for normal ohio electric (mostly coal...)
Don't know how much to build Nuclear and how many homes... Anyone? We could burn the waste in the next generation reactors if we get a bunch up and running now...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
This is 264,000 houses worth of energy that would have passed by the planet in space.
The more we do this, the more heat we put into the earth's biosphere.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Hi all,
aren't there costs of launching that are just to do with the sheer amount of fuel used to get things into orbit? How will this come down in price, and isn't that just wishful thinking?
Others have written about how space solar could be made far more economical if a moon-base were built for lower launch costs. And of course, once we have a base there all sorts of other space ventures become possible. (Lagrange stations, nice retirement destination, "Ark" on the moon, etc). So while I'm all for this just as an expensive proof of concept, surely the main goal for space solar would be a moon base to radically lower launch costs?
I think I'm a moon => L5 station => Mars kind of guy, however some say once we settle the Lagrange points we won't bother with settling Mars because who wants to get stuck on a gravity well?
The article says "Transportation of the solar panels into space is too expensive at the moment to be commercially viable, so Japan has to figure out a way to lower costs," so the transportation costs cannot be included in the stated $21B figure, making it seem of little value. At first I was really impressed since $21 a watt is within striking distance of being economically competitive. (Fossil fuel powered plants cost in the vicinity of $5 per watt to build PLUS fuel costs. And any new technology tends to come down in price with experience.) Another possible problem: The article says the satellite "produces" one gigawatt, which may not be the same as receiving one gigawatt on the ground. Anyone know the answer to that question?
There are two directions an economy can head to get out of a recession. One is up...
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
In this case, it's a terrible sign that the Japanese are so fed up with investing in the US that they now see hurling money into space as a better alternative.
Yeah but if it works, it'll generate income, there is a risk/reward here, unlike the Keynes "bury money in a mine" scenario.
I could make a smartass remark here about how the US government decided to bury millions of dollars in cable underground in the 1960s, connecting universities and research institutions with an inefficient government boondoggle...
Speaking of shooting money into space, you'll also notice that we didn't get integrated circuits to build computers with until after that wasteful Apollo program. The obvious conclusion is that government interference cause the Apollo program to prevent the genious MBAs from being able to sell their integrated circuits for at least a decade.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
No, actually, it doesn't mean either. It means an overall decline in economic activity across many dimensions taken together, the nearest thing to a single-dimensional rough definition is a decline in production rather than spending. A decline in spending usually occurs during a recession, but its not the same thing as a recession.
How much of that decline was spend cleaning up M$ malware? It looks like several tens of billions of dollars per year down the drain. I bet for 5 we could convert any M$ holdouts in the public and private sector over to desktops with customize { Openbox | Fluxbox | Xcfe | KDE } on { Linux | BSD | Solaris }. Removing any remnant M$ servers would be even faster and cheaper.
Then there is the problem of the soporific "M$ Look and Feel" Work that used to take an afternoon before M$ now takes most of several whole days to a week. However, the "M$ Look and Feel" is "so nice once you get used to it."
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
any coincidence here?
Sure lets beam more intense and focused solar energy into the upper atmosphere artificially heating it which would then surely make me a believer in the scam known as Human Induced Global Warming. All the while risking populations, habitats on the surface of the earth. This is a case of the cure being worse than the so called disease which is the Hoax known as Human Induced Global Warming
But those power plants can't be relocated easily. A space based solution could be designed with a mobile receiver for military/disaster relief use...
"...capable of producing one gigawatt of energy ... enough to power 294,000 homes"
...or one heavily modified DeLorean.
Conficker racked up $9 billion in damages during its first quarter. That's far from the only worm out there. Old windows malware doesn't go away it's just added to the zoo.
Compare that to the estimated development costs for your average linux distro run about $1 billion.
So the savings of eradicating MSFT products for just three months would, using those numbers, give enough money to start linux from scratch 9 times over and still break out even. The more polished linux distros are now quite a few years ahead of Windows in most areas. In the areas they aren't $9 billion could buy a lot of improvement. Of that hypothetical $9 billion, it wouldn't cost but a fraction to make Filezilla as nice as Fugu or cyberduck.
Oh, but wait. There's the long tail of the worm. The windows worms run for years.
Microsoft products just aren't engineered for security. Xp, Vista and Vista 7 show us that nothing changes on that front. That's not a technical problem any more, that's an HR problem. Get rid of the MSFT boosters and you raise productivty.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
And that's not even all of it. There was a plan a few years ago (when I stopped reporting on these things - no idea what the status of it is now) to bring some HVDC lines down from Alberta into the US down through MT, WY, etc, into California, connecting wind and other power plants on the way. Then California enacted a ban on importation of fossil-fuel generated power, and that plan went by the wayside. The people wanting to make the HVDC line didn't think the project would suceed with _just_ connecting new (unbuilt) wind farms to the grid.
I did address that, politics, in one of my posts you replied to.
There is cheap and there is relatively cheap. Neither of those implies easy, btw.
I agree, but as I also said before technically it is easy, the hard part is politics.
Not higher than building new reactors, but higher than are usually understood, since it's not the total picture, and higher than people attempting to do a direct comparison to what is actually building new reactors
You're right. You yourself said "ots of opposition from the locals who don't want large turbines 'spoiling' (personal opinion) their view, or making noise 24/7... Then when you also add in heavy transmission line costs, you also get to deal with rights of way and environmental impact studies for that entire transmission line route, etc, etc." You talk about cost related to wind but not nuclear. For instance you say how people don't want turbines in view but you don't say people don't want nuclear power plants near them either. You also talk about how people don't like the noise from them, without acknowledging modern turbines are quiet. Then again you talk about how impact studies for transmission line routes have to be done without saying they also need to be done with nuclear, and every other large scale power source.
You keep attributing cost to wind without acknowledging those same costs exist for other power sources. When I pointed that out previously you shrugged it off.
Also, scaling up a wind farm to the same power output as even one nuclear reactor in the 1000MW range is going to be interesting
How many years does it take to build a nuclear reactor? Years and years. Even in Finland it takes years. Finland's Olkiluoto 3 the third reactor at Olkiluoto, being built by the French government owned Areva, has experienced cost overruns and construction delays. Olkiluoto 3 is already 3 year behind and "about $2.4bn dollars (1.7bn euros) over budget". They still don't know when it will start operations, the easiest expected is 2012.
Oh, and neither Finland nor France has the US's regulations. So compound their problems with those from building in the US.
Like the wind power industry isn't? Dude, you need to do some reading!
Sorry I already have. Not one energy source does not get subsidies. However all alternative energy sources only get a fraction of the subsidies coal, natural gas, nuclear, and petroleum get individually. Alternative energies all together only get a couple of hundred million dollars. Individually the others get more than a billion each. Here's a video of Rep Edward Markey enumerating what subsidies different industries get. He starts with saying over the years the nuclear industry has gotten $125 Billion. Altogether all the potential alternative energy sources, be it biofuel and biomass, geotherm
Should there be a Law?
1.21 Gigawatts!
Hrm, now you've got me wanting to go back and watch some more of the older ones (Moore / Connery). It's been at least 10 years since I've watched any of them. I've forgotten most of them.
Yea, whenever I go into a store and see a set of Bond movies I have to fight off the urge to buy it. I have 9 of them now, 8 of which are on tape. Thinking about it I think it's ironic that I have hundreds of DVDs but only one Bond movie on DVD.
Oh, thinking about it I wonder what a movie would be like with Antonio Banderas as Bond. He's Spanish so I'm not sure it would work with him playing an English spy, maybe a Spanish version?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?