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Astrium Hopes To Test Grabbing Solar Energy From Orbit
goldaryn writes "Word from the BBC today is that Europe's biggest space company is seeking partners to help get a satellite-based solar power trial into orbit:
'EADS Astrium says the satellite system would collect the Sun's energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity. Space solar power has been talked about for more than 30 years as an attractive concept because it would be 'clean, inexhaustible, and available 24 hours a day.' However, there have always been question marks over its cost, efficiency and safety. But Astrium believes the technology is close to proving its maturity.'"
...would collect the Sun's energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity.
Can someone give a safety analysis please? It's my understanding infrared energy can be refracted by the atmosphere or diffused when there is particulate -- and if the beam strength is high enough, there's the potential for it to scatter and hit an unintended target. You know, like your skull.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I would like a Ring around the earth like they had in the series Gundam 00. With three main towers to beyond Geo sync, and fricking huge!!! Of course if one of the towers should fail.... LOOK OUT BELOW!!!!
Don't build cities in the orbital direction of the towers on the ground, cause it sucks to be them.....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
It may be close to proving is viability, but there's no way anyone has any business calling this not-even-prototyped tech "mature."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
system would collect the Sun's energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity
To "provide electricity" or to "discuss the location of the hidden rebel base"?
Is anyone else scared?
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
I don't know how so many people are able to drive in traffic, given how scared people get by the most unlikely things. Only 30% of the Earth's surface is land, and we only inhabit a fraction of that. I'll take my chances. Let's see what this tech can actually do.
Why is it that we can put something in orbit to avoid the atmosphere losses, but then beam it down through the same atmosphere they are avoiding in order to use it on the ground.
Seems to me like you're going to have the same parasitic losses.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I thought microwave transmission was the way to go, and they had worked out how to avoid accidentally frying non-target stuff on the ground.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Ok, I know this would displace some fossil fuel energy use (that
is increasing the greenhouse effect and trapping heat on Earth.)
But beaming electromagnetic energy (infrared, microwaves, whatever)
from part of the Sun's radiation that was going to miss Earth in the
first place seems to be adding energy to the Earth (and thus eventually
adding heat to the Earth, as the organized EM energy degrades
(gets used and entropized).
Has anyone done the calculations to make sure that the GHG emission
replacement factor of this new energy (thus its reduction of heat trapping)
is more than the brand new heat it is adding to the Earth system?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
When their line of sight is obscured by the polish air force landing on the sun?
"Critics, though, have always pointed to multiple hurdles - to the cost of launching and assembling large solar stations in orbit, to the losses in efficiency in conversion, and to the safety issues surrounding some wireless transmission methods, particularly those that use microwaves.
Astrium says the latter can be addressed by using infrared lasers which, if misdirected, would not risk "cooking" anyone in their path."
I got a great laugh out of that one. A+ journalism!
Just do the math, it doesn't work. The cost of launch utterly WIPES OUT any hope of income. Look, rockets are expensive, electricity isn't. That's all there is to it.
Want numbers? Fine:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/space-power/
Sounds to me like the EU's attempt to get a weapon in space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Another_Day: The North Koreans already did it!
We know we can collect/generate electricity from the Sun -- PV or steam driven turbine.
And we know we can transmit it (electricity) across long distances using microwave and/or infrared.
Isn't this just adding "from space" to the equation?
Not unlike adding "with a computer" or "over the internet" to a patent?
Assuming this can be done efficiently enough to take large scale, wouldn't this actually contribute to global warming? We're taking energy that normally would not hit the planet, beaming it down to use as a cheap source of electricity, which then gets turn into heat.
Right? Or would we radiate enough heat out of the atmosphere if we could stop using fossil fuels to negate it?
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I've said it before and I'll say it again: orbital solar makes no economic sense. You get 4 times the power capacity for a given amount of solar panel surface area, compared to building in a desert somewhere, at a mere thousand times the cost! Maybe someday it will make sense, but not any time soon.
Now there is an exception to this: if you've got an efficient system for sending power down to a ground station then there is potential for power distribution to remote sites. The US military would love this, as it would eliminate much of the insatiable thirst for diesel in places like Afghanistan and simplify their logistics enormously. But even for this why would you want to build a big heavy satellite with huge solar panels? Just build a satellite that picks up power from a base station and beams it back down. Simpler, cheaper and more reliable.
Though it seems like a cool idea, I cannot see how getting a power source in an unregulated (no laws) area like space would be beneficial.
Who's gonna be the first bean counter to get fired because he/she signed up for this new service then was unable to perform normal duties when the system was accidentally hit by a rock and there's no backup.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
It costs roughly 10,000$/kg to launch all the materials used in these orbital solar power stations. There is simply no way that it is cheaper to launch solar panels into orbit at that cost than to build a set of mirrors to focus solar energy on to solar panels or using it to crack water using one of the many thermochemical cycles that exist and using that to make fuel or run the produced Hydrogen through a fuel cell.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Its about as dangerous as the inside of a coal fired plant boiler - ie not a good place to stand, if they used a high intensity beam. They probably wont though. Although some solar cells on the ground receiving end can take 400 suns intensity, they require active cooling or they melt (very much the same as CPUs in computers, and roughly the same energy per area). If your cooling failed, you would damage your reciever, so it would be an expensive repair.
The point of solar from space is that you get around 5x as much sunlight to work with up there (less nighttime, clouds, and atmosphere absorption). So if the extra costs of putting it up there are less than 5x as high, you are ahead by putting it in space. If not, you are better off putting it on the ground.
For certain uses like the military, even an expensive, but *steerable* power source is a big win over using trucks carrying fuel.
And since power in space is currently a lot more valuble than on the ground, a first experiment should be to beam power *up*, for example to add extra power to the Space Station, or to test out that nifty VASIMR plasma thruster, they eat lots of power. Power on board the Space station runs $140/kWh, around 1000x what it sells for on the ground, so sending it *up* makes economic sense.
Venture Capitalists, don't let yourselves be fooled...
You really think it's about energy?
Maybe I buy a new tin-foil hat... this time with a mirror-like finishing...
There is a high-tech way to have clean, cheap energy. Everything was going great until hysteria set in in the 70s. Explain to me why a 1GW plant (with a 92% uptime unlike solar or wind) running on 7 lbs of thorium per day is not a universally accepted bipartisan plan? Why aren't we mass producing LFTRs globally?? The LFTR, breeders, and other types of 4th generation reactors ARE the solution. Mass producing them and getting the technology ready is a lot more likely to happen than a "renewable" future or orbit solar energy. If the billions wasted in "alternative energy" research and subsidies were wisely invested into 4th gen nuclear technology things would look a lot better today.
Do you have any idea how much popcorn the world's armed forces eat each year!
If EADS and the others had a brain, they would skip the beaming of power down, and instead developed a means of sending power to orbit first (useful for sending power to the ISS or other sats; it will require ultra caps up there), AND develop a way to relay the energy. The relay would be useful on a plane for the DOD (sending power to forward bases) as well as for disaster areas. FOr example, think Haiti. Think Katrina. Think Ca last week. By being able to put a drone up with infrared sending power to it, and then beam it down via multiple signals, it would allow real power tools to be brought in. We have seen the walking skeletons (aka alien), and the ability to lift things. Think of how useful that concept would be in Haiti right now.
Once you get beaming of power around, THEN, it becomes useful to put solar cells into space. Personally, I would put it around mars and the moon first. Have 2 or three sats providing power, to beam down to missions with ultra-caps.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seriously is this Free energy or a Solar powered weapon ? How about transmitting the energy to Earth via powerful radio transmission ? So only a receiver at the correct frequency will absorb power, Tesla style...
You would use the same solar panels they have there now, but since the Station is in the earth's shadow 40% of the time, they don't generate power currently during part of the orbit. And by bypassing the batteries on the truss, you also gain from not having the battery conversion losses, so its possible to get around a 2x total power increase.
@LehiNephi - The Space Station is a big enough target that atmospheric distortion is not a problem. At that altitude you would be able to see a target about 1.5m across without adaptive optics, and the station is a lot larger than that.
@TheKidWho - yes, a single ground station does not provide coverage of much of the Station's ground track. But remember that each of the 4 solar arrays on the station cost $300million, even a small increase in power would pay for a lot of overgrown searchlights. Because the target is so large, your optics on the ground does not have to be as good as a telescope, somewhat better than those big searchlights they use for store openings will work.
The space station is typically 1 arc minute across when seen from the ground, which is about the same resolution as the human eye, or about 1/30 the width of the moon, its a big target.
I can see some hundred or two hundred years in the future, bands of nomadic mutants push a captured maiden from the Vault into the "beam of light" to be purified....
So wait... we're going to let some company put a giant, solar powered, petawatt laser into orbit and just wait around for some evil genius to figure out they just need to aim that thing at a nuclear reactor or something? Hell that wouldn't take an evil genius I just thought of it. Not saying I don't want orbital solar power... just saying the delivery method could be safer.
In Soviet Russia, your lazor 'a'charges you!
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
why not send up mirrors instead of panels? The mirrors can be relatively lightweight and conventional ground stations can be used as recievers. They could be aimed at existing ground stations to give them power during the night.
Am I the only one that considers it *bad* to harness as much solar power as possible, store it, and use it in ways that generates excess heat *inside* our atmosphere where it would have otherwise bounced off instead?
Doesn't the essentially *increase* global warming?
All your math and reasoning is sound, this proposal makes *zero* economic sense for the general civilian electricity market (most cases). But I think, from what they are shooting for as customers eventually, that this won't matter as much, the cost part. They are defense and space contractors and what they want to build is a near-virtual instant completely mobile power plant, and sell that service to governments/militaries. ex: All of a sudden they need a megawatt or three of reliable power over here behind this sand dune in east ashcanistan, they need a lot of power. they need it *today*. Try to truck or fly in the all hardware plus fuel for the whole plant, directly through "bad guy" territory, get it set up and running, or only have to have a smaller receiver station, perhaps delivered in one fast helo load? I think that's the real target and business model.
Another use would be for disaster relief, a fast big power supply at the scene. Situations like that can justify a higher cost and being highly mobile.
I was reading last month or so ago what it costs to run fuel generators in ashcanistan out in the boonies there..man..it winds up costing them something like 400 bucks a gallon to get fuel delivered. The cost is hugemongous to run those gennies in some circumstances then. This thing might actually turn out to be cheaper for extreme niche purposes like that.
Of course, on the other hand.. I don't care what they say, a huge electricity source in space, connected to a wicked powerful laser with precise aiming abilities...they can *claim* it ain't a weapon all day long...;)
Nearly thirty years ago, I spoke to someone at a meeting from the Space Sciences Inst, I believe it was. IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES, he told me that the environmental impact study had already been done several years before.
What he also told me was that they were NOT talking about megawatts/meter^2, but *watts*/m^2. That's not enough to cook a buzzard flying over it. They were talking about large arrays of receivers.
But that's too complicated, and you can't make movies with laser beams flashing through vacuum with it, so I guess some of the turkeys who post here can't deal with it....
mark "where do I sign up to go to orbit as a mechanic?"
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1512306&cid=30785704
Utterly hilarious!
(See BitzTream run in the URL above, after he being caught skimming like the typical troll does).