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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."
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
The amount of solar energy per m2 outside the Van Allen Belt is far more than what we get here on earth.
...24 hours of sun...
Maybe my geography or astronomy are off - Feel free to correct/bitch-slap me if I'm confused.
How does a satellite in geosynchronous orbit get 24-hours/day of sunlight?
/bitch-slap
The equator and the ecliptic are not on the same plane, which means the only times when a geosynchronous satellite is in eclipse is around the equinoxes. In the worst case it can last up to 80 minutes of shadow.
Maybe my geography or astronomy are off - Feel free to correct/bitch-slap me if I'm confused.
How does a satellite in geosynchronous orbit get 24-hours/day of sunlight?
Geosync is way out there. If the satellite's orbit were in the same plane as the Earth's, it would only get blocked for about an hour a day. But since geostationary orbit is inclined to Earth's orbit (as Earth's equator is inclined), it only gets blocked at all during two times of the year; the rest of the time, when it's "behind" Earth relative to the Sun, the Sun shines "over" or "under" the Earth and hits it unimpeded.
If you don't find what you see on the picture you've linked impressive, something is wrong with you.
Of course, that's just a drawing, so it's still just vaporware.
Yes I'm very much impressed by a screenshot from a game: http://www.egosoft.com/games/x3tc/info_en.php
Current power stations being built with two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors are in the $10 billion range, have an estimated life span around 25 years (versus 15), and produce more than twice as much power. This is a very expensive boondoggle in comparison.
Over time maybe the costs can come down. I guess you have to build one to figure out the process in any case.
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.
The Japanese have been known to take out 100 year mortgages, so electing a politician with a 50 year plan is not out of the question.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Agreed! It comes out to 71K per household!
I don't know what the average monthly bill is for electricity in Japan, but assuming a measly $200 per month, this thing would have to last 29 years just to break even! And that ignored maintenance costs and likely overruns!
If it works, it's a great proof of concept - and something you can sell to other nations once the costs come down.
Just so we're clear
SpaceX has published launch costs for the Falcon 9 Heavy @ $2,726 per pound, and Elon Musk testified before congress that they have plans to get costs down to $500 per pound.
"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.
Recession means "lack" of spending behavior, not "lack" of money. Often spending on promising technologies has important spin-off applications which bolster the economy / people spend money.
That seems to be the exact opposite problem of what we have in America. We thought we had way more money that we even thought we had. When the magicians disappeared, all the make-believe money that was coursing through the veins of the economy dried up and caused the businesses who were relying on people spending that make-believe money to burn out and fail. It was the lack of money that caused the lack of spending, not the lack of things to buy.
Nope, it's exactly the problem. The economy was cruising right along while people were (over) spending. The entire reason that the auto industry is in tough times is because people have been reducing their spending and putting off their car purchases. The economy was just fine when we were spending money, the problem was the money was from credit based on overvalued assets (such as houses).
This also explains why it takes time to get out of a recession. People need to spend money for companies to have the income to hire more employees, who can then buy other more stuff.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
And then you had a media who acted like it was the end of the world and caused some people to stop paying their mortgage. Seriously. I have a friend who is a banker and said that after all the media stories people who were never late on a payment just stopped paying. When they called them to ask why they haven't made a payment they responded by saying "Well my house is going to be foreclosed anyways..." they were shocked to learn that if they paid their loans like they have been paying they could continue living normally.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Yes, we have those around here as well, we call them "retarded". We usually don't give them loans, though.
Right... so what might cause an economy to stop producing as much stuff? Might it be... people aren't buying the stuff that gets made? That seems like a pretty basic cause-and-effect relationship to me.
It is a cause-and-effect relationship, it's just a completely unimportant one. The important thing is not that people aren't buying enough stuff, it's that the stuff being produced sucks ass.
The Keynesian response is to rob from people who aren't buying enough of the stuff that sucks ass, and give it to the people who do buy the stuff that sucks (and who are not getting enough benefit out of it in order to afford to buy more), in order to prop up the crappy producers who are wasting resources building stuff that sucks.
The correct, most economical, and most beneficial solution is to stop producing stuff that sucks ass, let the people who produce that stuff go bankrupt so that they will learn never to produce stuff that sucks again, and allocate their capital to producers who will create stuff that doesn't suck and that people with money will buy.
I'll respond to the rest in a few mins.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Tekfactory put his finger squarely on the problem. $500/pound is about $1000/kg and that is ten times to high for space based solar power to undercut fossil fuels. The Japanese recognize this.
"Transporting panels to the solar station 36,000 kilometers above the earth's surface will be prohibitively costly, so Japan has to figure out a way to slash expenses to make the solar station commercially viable, said Hiroshi Yoshida, Chief Executive Officer of Excalibur KK, a Tokyo-based space and defense-policy consulting company. "These expenses need to be lowered to a hundredth of current estimates," Yoshida said by phone from Tokyo.
I get the same number close enough. Current price to GEO $20,000/kg; required for space based solar power to displace fossils by being substantially less expensive (1-2 cents per kWh) is $100/kg, a factor of 200.
So design to cost. Start with the rocket equation:
Needed 100 t/hr to GEO, $100/kg. Try a two stage to GEO. Requires 14 km/sec, get the first 4 km/sec with a mass ratio 3 hydrogen/oxygen rocket. 4km/sec is easy to do, ask Elon Musk. To get the remaining 10 km/sec with a mass ratio 2 means an average exhaust velocity of 15km/sec.
Because you stage far short of LEO, the second stage must have relatively high thrust so 60 km/sec exhaust velocity ion engines won't do. Ablation laser propulsion (well understood physics) with an average exhaust velocity of 15 km/sec will provide over a g at 4 GW. The suborbital path keeps the second stage out of the atmosphere long enough (15 minutes) for the laser to push the second stage into geosynchronous transfer orbit.
At 4 payloads an hour (working the laser full time), each payload to GEO needs to be 25 t. So the laser stage is 50 t, the first stage 50 t (16%structure) and 200 t propellant. On takeoff it masses 300 tons, less than a 747. A large airport handles a lot more traffic than 8 747 takeoffs and landings an hour.
Hard engineering, no miracles required. Not cheap, the laser might eventually cost $40 billion. To get started (to positive cash flow) came out to $60 billion on a first cut proforma analysis.
A UK company, Reaction Engines, has an inordinately clever approach to boost the effective exhaust velocity so as to actually put positive payloads (12 tons) into LEO with hydrogen/oxygen single stage to orbit. What they are doing is recovering a lot of the energy that goes into liquefying hydrogen and using that to compress air to rocket chamber pressures up to 26km and Mach 5+. Google for them. Also Google henson oil drum if you want more details.
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain