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This Satellite Could Be Beaming Solar Power Down From Space By 2025
Daniel_Stuckey writes "A NASA veteran, aerospace entrepreneur, and space-based solar power (SBSP) expert, [John] Mankins designed the world's first practical orbital solar plant. It's called the Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large PHased Array, or SPS-ALPHA for short. If all goes to plan, it could be launched as early as 2025, which is sooner than it sounds when it comes to space-based solar power timelines. Scientists have been aware of the edge the "space-down" approach holds over terrestrial panels for decades. An orbiting plant would be unaffected by weather, atmospheric filtering of light, and the sun's inconvenient habit of setting every evening. SBSP also has the potential to dramatically increase the availability of renewable energy."
Only if with could you mean won't ...
A satellite directly beaming solar power down from space? We've created... the moon.
the microwave downlink gets misaligned and burns down the city block next to the ground station.
how exactly can it "revolutionize disaster relief" when it needs an almost 40km^2 (6-8km in diameter) receiver array on the ground to get the power beamed from the satellite. Disaster relief means fast deployment. How fast can you deploy a 40km^2 grid on the ground?
not even mentioning the fact that if you had 40km^2 of land you could just set solar panels there and do the thing for yourself with much less energy losses.
Japan is already working on a prototype solar power satellite. The ESA has an active project. I'd hope NASA could work with them on this one.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The energy needed to put solar cells into orbit is not recouped over their lifetime outside the protecting atmosphere. Solar cells are used on spacecraft out of necessity, not because they're cost efficient.
I know this is an unpopular view on Slashdot, where atomic energy fans come together to bash all other technologies, but solar cells work fine on the ground. You can fill the supply gaps with conventional power plants and still come out far ahead CO2-wise compared to the current power mix. Production has hardly scaled up, but solar cells are already competitive in some markets. The point of these stories about satellite solar farms is to give you the impression that there needs to be some extraordinary investment or innovation before solar power can be used. That's a lie, designed to put a drag on solar power. Solar power is ready to be used, you just have to do it.
can't wait for this to malfunction and cook my food in the backyard without any source but the beam......the grass might suffer but hey.
As opposed to seemingly every other ICS out there, would someone please at least a security engineer before they design the control API for the thing?
Make it big enough and block the sun, then charge for sunlight. I can't believe that some huge corporation hasn't found a way to get people (members/users?) to pay for sunny days yet, but things like this should get that ball rolling.
I remember a proposal like this back in the 1960's. My first question then is my first question now: If a satellite can "beam down" enough power to be useful as a power source, how is it not an orbital directed energy weapon?
I don't see any need for this. Most cooling and heating uses of electricity can be easily moved from nigh-time to day-time, just like when mid-day electricity was peak price. Unless they can show that there overall price, including transport to space, monitoring and maintenance of space and ground equipment, transportation losses, etc. beat _ALL_ current and near-future electricity storage solutions by a large margin. I don't see that happening.
Ancient:
causing Roman ships to burst into flame
Modern:
deliver power to any place on the ground that it can see
Energy is life and civilization. Balancing an industrial society on the razor edge of a single point of failure is itself a 'fail'. Whether the failure would occur technically or politically is of little consequence.
The catch-22 is impossible to avoid. If orbital solar doesn't scale then it is a waste of resource, if it does then it's a single point of (catastrophic) failure.
Terrestrial power plants can be replicated easily, hardened from sabotage, operated and maintained within many sovereign countries at once, can easily swap out parts. That is what you would wish to ensure the future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
off the hands of Bond villains and other evil master minds...
Oh, wait . . .
500 years on !!
In no way is this a "Lets put up a microwave beam weapon satellite and pretend that we are beaming power down by installing a secret Nuke reactor under a big dish."
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Hey, the sun is going to run out eventually, no?
(Plagiat is intentional)
Solar power falls off as r^2 from the sun. So why not put a giant magnifying glass in solar orbit at 10% earth distance and as long as there is line of sight between this thing and the magnifying glass (you could deploy multiple to get line of sight all the time) then you increase the solar flux reaching the satellite 100x.
If you can get the magnifying glass at 1% earth distance then you can increase solar flux reaching this thing 10000 times. seems like relatively little work for a major pay off. Mine asteroids for the materials for the magnifying glass or you could built an inflatable one. It doesn't need to be a complex design.
Has slashdot decided to start republishing tabloid stories from the grocery lines?
"convert that sunlight across a large radio frequency aperture into a coherent microwave beam and transmit the power to markets on Earth"
What could go wrong when pointing a large microwave beam at Earth?
Space-based solar doesn't make a lot of sense until we get a whole lot closed to a Kardashev Type I civilization than we actuallly are. There's simply no way that firing panels into space on a $100 million dollar rocket is more cost effective than sticking them on the ground where Bob the Electrician can install and maintenance them.
It does make sense though in some *very* limit circumstances. If you frequently work in areas that have no power infrastructure, and can afford the jaw-dropping premium of space-based power. Those two facts suggest this is the public face of some kind of military or intelligence project.
According to Sim City 2000 we should be getting this by 2020.
What happens if the microwaves beams are used as weapons against earth?
Spoiler alert, the book Energized by Edward Lerner (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13137561-energized) is about a power satellite that is taken over by bad people and used as a weapon against earth. Really good book.
Who gets to control the power? What kind of security is involved? Prelude to weaponization of space?
"An orbiting plant would be unaffected by weather, atmospheric filtering of light, and the sun's inconvenient habit of setting every evening." This is wonderful as everyone knows there isn't anything in space that could fly into the thing now that all the asteroids, space junk and comet debris have been cleared from earth orbit forever.
Maybe satellites could be used on mars to help keep colonists warm.
By the time you've taken into account the costs of launching this thing into space (and maintaining it) won't regular solar power work out as being more efficient? Alternatively, what about spending the money on developing more efficient solar panels?
soylentnews.org
The only orbits that have no period when the sun is blocked by Earth's shadow ("night") are polar (remember the pictures of sunrise over the Earth shot from space by various astro/cosmonauts?). No single ground station could receive the power.
Also, there would be considerable photon pressure pushing the satellite(s) away from the Sun and, hence, Earth, plus gravitational drag attempting to pull the orbits around he Earth. Not a big deal for a short-term recon satellite, but these would be intended to there for years. Any of the rocket scientists out there know if the polar orbits are even vaguely stable, or will the satellite need boatloads of fuel to stay where it's needed. Of course, the beam of Earthbound power is a thruster, too, raising the orbit.
Put the collector at the Eath-Sol L1 and you've got to have REALLY good beam control to keep from raising the temperature of the entire Earth.
Sounds more like weapon than a power source to me.
Why can't we do this, about a hundred times cheaper, on the ground?
Oh right, we need our gigantic orbital death lasers.
JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) has been working on such a system from a number of years and plans to have 1-gigawatt space solar power system operating around 2030. http://www.jaxa.jp/article/interview/vol53/index_e.html
it should be hear in 2020 but in 2050 FUSION power is better.
Homer Simpson will be the safety / control room guy
The obvious question is if the beams can be focused, and used as a weapon, it could provide a no-warning and very destructive attack anywhere in the world. It seems to be what Mankins is trying to avoid, and I tend to agree that (aside from cost) we really, really need to make sure that the power sources of the future are not just being used to cloak the real objective: Making powerful weapons.
Let me help you with that. The answer to your obvious question is "yes". Hence the problem...
Of course there are dozens of ways to use a high orbital position to control the Earth. Nuclear armed satellites. Project Thor. A nice collection of medium sized asteroids movable/targetable by means of e.g. Orion (small nukes used to push them, solar powered ion jets or solar sails for finer control).
I worked through the physics of this out of sheer curiosity a few years ago, and no, it really won't ever really be "safe", nor will it ever be cost effective. It is, in fact, a really stupid idea as far as I can tell. Solar cells are cheap and plentiful right here on the Earth, and are getting cheaper all the time. If you take a square kilometer of the Earth's surface, you have order of million square meters of collector (times cosine theta). On a cloud free day, you have anywhere from 700 to 900 watts/m^2 hitting the collector panels (peak a bit higher, these are sort-of-averages). Depending on the kind of panel, you get (say) 10% conversion (cheaper panels get less, more expensive ones get more). Call it 90 watts per square meter. Your one kilometer square area thus yields ballpark of 90 megawatts -- but let's say only 50 (and of course, only during the daytime). 20 square kilometers is thus a gigawatt plant, which is quite respectable -- an area some (say) 5 km squared, allowing for roads and access and the need to be able to tip them through at least some angle to maintain a small angle of incidence as the sun moves overhead. The cost per watt of the panels is order of $1 (probably less, at this scale). The cost of the land is whatever we want it to be, if we use public lands or inexpensive fallow lands that cannot be used for much else (abundant in the southwest, less so in the more developed midwest and east). Let's presume that the additional cost of the land, the electronics, and at least a modest storage array to buffer small fluctuations in power delivery is another $1/watt. You end up with a 1 GW plant for 2 billion dollars, which is actually not particularly crazy even now in places where electricity costs a lot (which is why private citizens are doing it). In reality, I think it would end up costing maybe half of this by the time economies of scale kicked in, which would give you an amortization time of less than a decade on the initial capital investment and at least a decade of pure profit. Not the fastest way to make money, but not a money loser and in a market dominated by low interest rates a not unreasonable ROI.
Now take the same solar panels -- the EXACT same solar panels, mind you -- into orbit. A couple of useful (approximate) numbers. It costs 64 megajoules to give 1 kg escape velocity (1/2 times 1 kg times (11.2 \times 10^6)^2). An orbit costs anywhere from 1/2 of this to the full amount, depending on the orbit. A geosynchronous orbit would actually cost most of it at 5 R_e -- call it 50 megajoules per kilogram. Of course, this is the pure energy cost at perfect efficiency. In fact, the cost in US dollars per kilogram in GEO is order of $10,000!
Assuming -- not unreasonably -- that the solar panels we lift into orbit mass out at a 100 grams per square meter, and are absolutely egregious in assuming that they get ten times the power per square meter compared to collectors on the Earth's surface (2-3 from higher insolation, the rest from extending "daylight" hours by a factor of almost three, still leaves us short but with round numbers) we can, indeed, get our (earth surface equivalent) orbiting GW at an equivalent cost factor of roughly 100. That m
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I saw the disastrous effects of this very system on an episode of Futurama and everyone under the reflected light toasted into vapor.
Just sayin' -- you get your science from your sources, I'll get mine... etc.
"the receiver on Earth will be large—about 6 to 8 km in diameter, positioned 5 to 10 meters above the ground. It will be constructed from millions of rectifier diodes—true quantum devices—wired together." I had no idea they've been building quantum devices since the 1950's.
"The cost per watt of the panels is order of $1 (probably less, at this scale). "
We sell 1st tier, 3rd party warranty panels for 69 cents RETAIL. Large-buy wholesale prices are around 50 cents right now.
"get ten times the power per square meter"
Raw numbers are about 8 times. But then you have to consider the lifetime of the panels (1/2) and the transmission losses (1/2) and you'll end up with the space panel making perhaps 2 times as much power at any given time, and 1/2 over it's lifetime.
Earth is fairly closed loop system. We receive a set amount of energy from the sun, and a VERY small amount of energy from other sources.
Adding a large amount of energy that was destined to speed it's way out into the cosmos, potentially causing a more distant planet to cool (or even heat, there's the odd chance that the solar wind hitting the ionosphere of one of the distant planets could cause an interesting cooling effect by stripping away upper atmosphere, but I digress) WILL have unforeseen effects, not limited to us causing one of the more distant planets to lose mass, and swing wildly out of control into our own.
Messing with large balances of energy in a closed system is one thing, mixing systems is a whole different issue. (one that's ALMOST sure to lead to MASSIVE problems)
Sim City 2000 already thought of this idea in 1993 (ish)...
No argument from me. I was presenting the most favorable case (made a few years ago -- PV solar keeps dropping (and, I think, will continue to drop) and as I noted, cheaper solar cells favor ground based installations even more because you have to pay truly absurd amounts to lift any solar cell into orbit, many, many times the actual cost of the cell.
I was equally generous in guesstimates of transmission efficiency (trying to make the case FOR as best I could) but yeah, even though "in principle" microwave power transmission can be as high as 90% efficient, I'd be rather surprised if it averages 50%.
But if you are in the business, you fully understand all of this even better than I do. It is no longer a matter of if, but when, and it won't matter if power companies build large scale generating plants or not, because as prices creep down from $1/watt, amortization times (which are a function of local power costs and local insolation) decrease to where they range from being a no-brainer to a new home builder (buy this home for $10,000 more, but with free electricity for a lifetime included in the price) and a reasonable investment to an older home owner. They are JUST too expensive for me to really justify in NC right now, partly because electricity is so cheap here. And, note well, I've already bought some $20,000 of replacement high efficiency AC/furnaces for the house (with at least decadal amortization times) simply because they DID make long term sense. This of course actually increases my amortization time, because with R40 in the attic, low-E windows throughout, and high efficiency multi-level AC and natural gas units, my energy costs are already easily halved from what they were before with old hardware and cheap wood frame windows and R11 in the attic. Even if I dropped my energy costs to zero (which I can't do with natural gas for cooking, hot water, and heat) it would take me a solid decade to amortize a rooftop array capable of handling the AC and other electrical loads, neglecting maintenance.
In California or Arizona, higher power costs, better insolation, less natural gas availability (maybe) it probably makes sense for everybody with the free capital already. By 2020, it will probably make good sense in NC where it is still marginal. By 2025, what will be the point? The entire lower 2/3 of the US will be installing solar with or without any sort of subsidy, at the level of individual homeowners even if the major power companies DON'T decide to investing in a few square kilometers of collectors per state. The square kilometers will accumulate a rooftop at a time either way.
Then, I have a model for building a large-scale solar updraft generator that can probably kick even PV solar's butt, that will work ideally in comparatively arid states with sunny south-facing mountains. It has the further advantage of actually contributing to global cooling by directly transporting heat from the surface up to the upper troposphere, above the bulk of the greenhouse layer, where it can radiatively cool much more efficiently (although yeah, this is a drop in the proverbial bucket of incoming energy:-)
None of this changes the conclusion -- putting solar cells in orbit to fuel the Earth is just plain stupid, however nifty or cool it appears to be at first glance. We'd be far better off putting the $100 billion directly into research into how to drop transmission costs (improve long distance transmission efficiencies) and/or store energy in high capacity long lifetime batteries (or other storage modalities, e.g. pumping water uphill during the day with a fraction of the solar to recover hydroelectric at night, or ditto with compressed air in giant underground caverns created with small nukes). Either one would be a game changer for solar, because a trivial fraction of the Saraha or the southwest US could supply 100% of the energy needs of the rest of the US or of Europe if we could either/both store it during the day and transmit it to the polar regions without a huge efficien
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
This comes up every 10-15 years.
a) why not put the same solar cells on earth, rather than in space. You can deliver them by truck or train, instead of by rocket.
b) you can tie into existing electrical grid delivery infrastructure. You don't have to have the cost and conversion efficiency from DC to microwaves and back. The most efficient microwave sources these days are in the 60% DC to RF conversion efficiency.
c) you can buy a lot of energy storage (pumped hydro, thermal, etc.) for the cost of a rocket.
d) it doesn't take a lot of geographical diversity to make ground based power pretty reliable. The desert areas have 350+ days of sun a year. Conventional power plants go offline more often than that
e) if you need a big receiver array on the ground, what's the tradeoff if you use that same area for solar thermal or solar cells on the ground?
WHy does this come up? Because space systems engineers like to find things that you can do in space. So of course you propose space based solutions. And it's good that you do, because this kind of thing needs to be revisited periodically. Technology does change, and it's worth spending a *little bit* of money to do it. To keep Mankins and similar folks fed, housed, and not on the street committing crimes doesn't cost a lot, and has beneficial side effects.
For what it's worth, John Mankins is the guy who invented the "Technology Readiness Level" (TRL) scale.
if you read the report on SPS-ALPHA
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/716070main_Mankins_2011_PhI_SPS_Alpha.pdf
You'll find that it is full of lots of ideas, but not a lot of substance. It puts together the management concepts, and how you'd make decisions, etc. but doesn't directly address feasibility (left as future work).
And, of course, it has lots of the latest trendy stuff: swarms of self organizing nano-satellite modules, etc.
"I was equally generous in guesstimates of transmission efficiency (trying to make the case FOR as best I could) but yeah, even though "in principle" microwave power transmission can be as high as 90% efficient, I'd be rather surprised if it averages 50%."
Yeah, this one is murder. The transmitter is about 70% efficient, the receiver about 90, and modern inverters are about 95%. So .70 x .90 x .95 = 59%
To all the kids reading this. LEARN F'ING MATH. It will save you from believing in all sorts of BS like this.
"because as prices creep down from $1/watt"
I put a dozen SolarWorld 230's on my garage in 2010. At that time the panels were $2.30 a watt, the Enphase M190's about $1 a watt, and the rest of the system probably cost another $1 because of a long wire run I had to pull.
Due to changes in the local laws (Ontario FIT) we're looking at bringing SolarWorld back (great panels) as a premium brand. Most likely we'd stock the 275's, and sell them around 95 cents.
Thats in THREE YEARS.
Running the numbers, at current pricing PV in Toronto runs about 20 cents/kWh. That's pretty astonishing, considering that that's the flat price over 20 years. You see, our current price for power is about 15 cents, but over 20 years of inflation that takes you to about 25 cents. That's parity.
I don't think anyone out there really sees this yet. PV has gone from something only the military and aerospace companies used to something that can power your house cheaper than the local power plant, and did that in less than a decade.
All of this space stuff is bogus. Simply look over the list of participants. Not a single one of them comes from the solar world or the power world more broadly. Each and every one of them is a space guy. This isn't about power, it's about finding excuses to build rockets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GODRkYrFhO0
It is indeed finding and excuse to build rockets and space stations, which rarely make sense at $10,000/kg except for one-off research platforms and for communications.
In NC electricity is a lot cheaper -- that's why I just can't make it work. OTOH we probably get a lot more sun than Toronto:-). But as you say, it keeps dropping. I was shopping in West Marine for boat stuff and took a moment to look at their 90 and 130 W polycrystalline panels -- for almost exactly $1/watt, with (boat scale) inverters included. There are also nice larger scale systems out there, but I still at best break even -- a few years after I will probably be dead -- at $1/watt installed, with mandated power buyback from the local utility to serve instead of local storage. By 2015, 2017, somewhere in there, I expect that it will cross the magic line, and when I have enough kids graduated from college and launched I might do it, if only because I'm a physicist and PV solar is so cool that it's worth it to me at anything on the high side of break even even if I don't live to get the full amortized payback. Somebody will, when they buy the house, and hopefully my heirs would recover at least some of the investment then.
If I were building a new house, I'd probably build it in anyway, because who gives a damn about an extra $10-20K on the mortgage, which should get me at least a few KW on the roof at break even compared to the mortgage. $100/month on the mortgage vs $100/month for electricity -- it's a wash no matter what the amortization. Right now I pay $190/month for electricity, including all summer AC. It would be hard to recover that for the equivalent cost in a refinanced mortage, but it is at least getting close.
And yeah, it would be so lovely if anybody would learn to do EVEN arithmetic, but hey, I teach physics at Duke to very bright students and THEY struggle with "Fermi estimates", scaling arguments, and yes, sometimes even arithmetic when it isn't a matter of plugging into a provided formula, and then there is the algebra...
I'd point out that climate science in general suffers from this problem, especially when the lay population wants to play, but this is /. and if I did I would be excoriated, burned in effigy, and so on, because looking at the actual numbers is verboten when there are highly politicized summaries one can quote from instead.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Isaac Asimov
Odd, I'm the first to comment that he wrote a story about exactly this. I'm not sure he originated the idea or was inspired by a scientific article but it seemed noteworthy.
You ./ers do _know_ who I'm talking about or am I the only one here not in his teens?
01/01/01
Wouldn't a good walloping mass ejection from the sun just fry an orbital array? I'm sire if its big enough it would fry a ground based system too, but there's a huge amount of difference between what goes blasting through space and what hits the ground....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Last time I did something similar in Simcity, my city got attacked by aliens...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
This is way off topic, but I'll bite anyway.
The text of the second amendment is thus:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The first clause is an explanation for the second, and the amendment clearly places a limit on the power of the federal government (later amendments and rulings mean that this also affects the states). And that limit is that congress does not have the power to infringe the right of the people to own and carry weapons.
It does not say what kind of weapons. It does not grant congress a "reasonableness" pass, to allow them to regulate particularly dangerous or unpopular weapons. A modern reading could imply that the explanatory clause could be used to imply that congress may be able to pass some kind of perfunctory regulation, as long as that regulation does not infringe on the people's ability to keep and bear those arms. Perhaps through a mandatory firearm safety course or basic military training course for all citizens.
However, even that much doesn't really fly in the face of the ninth and tenth amendments. Especially the tenth.
What many of the "reasonable gun control" people (and certainly not all by a long shot) seem to fail to recognize is that while reasonable gun control may be desirable, especially in light of the far more destructive and portable weapons available today compared to the founders' day, the price doing it without having a constitutional amendment specifically enabling congress to act is the watering down of the constitution as a compact with the people.
What else can we conveniently interpret away or ignore that allows congress more power, and more importantly strips power away from the ostensibly consenting governed?
If you want gun control to quell your fears, it's certainly not an unreasonable goal, but the safest way to seek it is not to demand immediate action in immediate aftermath of each tragedy, but to demand the thoughtful debate of the constitutional amendment process. Then we can decide as a nation what level of risk we're really willing to live with, balanced against what powers we really want to allow the government to have.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Dreamt up in 1976 before most of you were born
http://www.amazon.com/Challenge-Hellmaker-Walt-Richmond/dp/044110150X/
Place the solar cells on the ground, focus extra light on them with space based mirrors.
Thin metallized plastic foil mirrors are light and can be made much larger than cells for same payload weight.
Unfortunately it can also be used as space weapon.
for us to ever depend on:
Carrington Event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
This isn't about power, it's about finding excuses to build rockets.
Not quite.
This is about pushing the boundaries of what we can do. This is about shooting so high we're staring into the sun.
There was no reason for us to go to the moon. In and of itself, it accomplished nothing to improve the lot of humanity, but it was a hell of a thing. It made people dream, it inspired an untold amount of people to go into STEM fields, and on a more direct note, it advanced electronics tremendously.
As a race, we need to do big, audacious things. This is one of them, It should be done. It's not as big a thing as going to the Moon, but it's bigger than getting a cup of coffee.
I'm willing to bet that even if it is just as much a flop as you think it will be, (And you seem to know what you're on about, so I'm willing to concede that if it were done with the current technology, you're probably right.), inside of 20 years, it'll pay for itself in many ways, the least of which might be the power beamed back down to Earth.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
why solar and not run a wire into the ionosphere? they've done it before in a satellite test... and it generated massive energy. why solar?? if they have the place/technology to beam the resultant energy (microwave to base station) without fear of hurting anyone... I don't see why they wouldn't go for max power
This SBSP 'proposal' is very embarrassing.
Please delete the file and forget all posts and opinions therein.
The StratoSolar concept uses a buoyant platform to raise PV cells to 20km altitude. That way they get more light, are above the weather, and operate at higher efficiency due to the cold.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
If you capture solar energy that was not destined to enter the Earth, and you send it to Earth, then it is contributing to global warming.
This might be about more than just cost. Don't know if cost will be competitive or not. It does have the advantage that power will be available 24/7 and clouds do not impede the collection of solar energy. These low intensity radio waves will go through cloud cover. So it would become an available all the time reliable source of electricity.
Havent they been talking about this for 30 years already ???
Yes Technology has moved forward, but it just takes one thing impractical to make the full thing not work (engineering is a downer like that)
Conversion of the energy for transmission (I assume they got something with low loss thru atmosphere) and then conversion into electricity on the recieving end -- the classic problems (secondary might be if the reception places are remote, then transmission loss over power lines might be added ontop - they sometimes are significant)
Secondarily might be green-freeak issues (irridating ground so some roach becomes 'endangered or somesuch) - but then china or russia might have no problems (but then you will have to compete with power industries largely unhindered by green-freak issues alreadyy)
Theres is the fun (for space based machinery) of dissapating waste heat in a vacuum which adds ALOT of extra overhead and we ARE talking about a substantial amount of power passing thru such a rig. (waste of the conversion process which even when quite high leaves the rest which needs to be handled)
"As a race, we need to do big, audacious things"
I'm all for it.
"This is one of them, It should be done"
If you're looking for big audacious things to do, how about going to Mars? It would cost about the same, or less, have infinitely more scientific value, increase rocketry much more than a GEO launch, and help avoid a species-ending event. SPSs, on the other hand, simply suck up money and return nothing.
Given the possible universe of "cool things to do", why would we pick this particular brain dead one?
Satellites are reliable but every once on a while the do have problems including orientation. That beam would be deadly Also, space is not clean. Test panels come back looking like they'd been sandblasted after a few years. Then there's the CME. I'd think this thing would be more vulnerable to CMEs than many other satellites.
Anyone ever thought about a solar tower plant ? With mirrors reflecting the sun towards a tower where natrium or some other substance is heated up to hundreds of degrees celcius and then drives a turbine to generate electricity. Clean power, the ideal industry for counties like Spain, Greece or Mexico to become an energy supplier for surrounding countries.
You just know that it will just be a short time before terrorists hijack the controls for directing the beam and Stephen Baldwin has to save us.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.