for what it's worth when I tried their website at 20:44 on Sunday
www.solarenspace.com
I got a "site disabled because bandwidth exceeded" msg. from the 3rd party hosting co. their website is on

There's no end to it -- one techno fix after another. Always based on the idea that there's a huge amount of energy out there -- if we are smart enough, we can get to it.

Matter is energy. E=mc^2 showed that. So the amount of energy right in our finger nail clippings could put us into orbit. So it's totally beside the point. If the various forms of energy were easy to get, we would have blown ourselves up long ago. No -- we would never even have evolved.

We KNOW that radically reducing our energy consumption is possible. But that we don't do because there's no profit in it, never mind its not being a path to world domination. So that route, the one we must eventually take one way or another, doesn't make the list.

To some extent it reminds me of the all the old schemes, some immensely clever, to build perpetual motion machines, despite the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

The problem is that there in no equivalent to the 2nd law of thermodynamics in regard to peak oil and peak energy. There does not seem to be some general law that absolutely precludes harnessing vast new sources of energy. So one is over and over again confronted with new schemes. Many of them require a good degree of technical expertise to evaluate, because on the surface there is no abvious reason they could not work, if only the total EREOI were right. But to show that isn't the case is what's so difficult.

As a general rule, there is a huge escalation is in infrastructure and technology requirements, and exactly how huge they are and accounting for all of them could be a big job. And by the time one does it, one has technical people in fierce debates that are unintelligible to laymen.

But this much can be said: all of these schemes, including all forms of nuclear power too, BTW, depend on the continuance and stability of our current industrial ane technical infrastructure -- they are not robust. They are therefore gigantic gambles.

We are asked to gamble on technology fixes that most cannot evaluate, instead of even giving serious consideration to the one option that we know will address the issue.

I hasten to add that the techno fixes also have in common the feature that they ignore "peak everything", as Heinberg puts, as well as further damaging the natural ecology which is the ONLY resource we'll have left when we do come to our senses.

-----------

One little question about this particular scheme -- no dangers attending to the little problem of getting the energy down to the ground?

"Who knows, perhaps the horse will learn to sing hymns."
"Would you bet on it?"
Charlie looked out of the curve of her arm. "At these odds? Curse, yes!"
"Crazy Eddie!"
"Yes. A Crazy Eddie solution. What else is there? One way or another, the Cycles end now. Crazy Eddie has won his eternal war against the Cycles." Jock looked to Ivan and met a shrug. Charlie had gone Crazy Eddie. It hardly mattered now; it was, in fact, a fine and enviable madness, this delusion that all questions have answers, and nothing is beyond the reach of a strong left arm.

Yes, it would be good to get some idea of the dangers. What would happen if the source somehow or other started some weird gyrations--there are many possible causes, such as space debris--and the beam of energy started swinging wildly? How does the beam of energy affect anything that could get in its path? What provisions are there for shutdown in case of malfunction?

As for the argument that such a system presupposes the continuance of our technical civilization and a stable world order--and thus means the continued exploitation of our limited resources,...yes, but...Are we doomed to return to an existence somewhat like what Haiti has today? Shouldn't we at least try to find a solution, instead of throwing up our hands in the air and giving it all up?

Peak oil provides a prediction and a challenge. Is there some sort of anti-technological imperative operating in these critiques? So long as we do have the capability and the means, why not try? Or is there some fount of wisdom and insight unavailable to we poor mortals that says we must just stop trying, lay down and die? What's the point? Sure, things wear out, resources are depleted, but in a universe as immense as ours, surely there are many sources of exploitable energy other than oil? I wonder if the peak wood people felt this way? Did they just advocate that we give up because we'd never find another source of energy like wood?

Predictions of doom seem to be a constant ingredient of the human condition. There are so many thousands of such predictions around. And all of them presuppose some supernaturally acquired knowledge of limits and terminations, some alleged higher moral conviction than most of us have. I just don't see it. I don't accept it. I recognize no higher authority. I do not accept these claims as valid or persuasive. They are bogus.

Whether we're talking about space-based solar, carbon capture and sequestration, batteries for EVs, or any of the million-and-one topics that come up, I think it's always worth taking a deep breath and forcing yourself to slow down and not leap to conclusions. In other words, we should approach these discussions like scientists: Go exactly where the data leads, and nowhere else.

For me, this means it's inescapably true that peak oil and climate chaos are both real, huge, and imminent problems. And some would-be solutions, like SBSP, CCS, and hydrogen fuel cell cars all have at least one killer flaw and don't look at all promising, unless one introduces a deus ex machina level of technological breakthrough or turn of events.

But it's always worth discussing these things and forcing ourselves to be rigorous and look at the hard data about what exists now, plus the most reasonable assumptions about what we're likely to develop in the near future. E.g. algae biodiesel is insignificant today, but everything I've read suggests that it's extremely promising and could be a welcome contributor to getting us off petroleum and onto something without all its nasty baggage (to put it mildly).

Gav, I dispute a couple of the listed advantages:

• There is more energy to be collected - the sun is 8-10 times more intense in orbit than on the surface of the Earth
• Space based systems can collect energy almost around the clock

Orbiting what? The solar intensity outside the atmosphere is 1.37 kW/meter^2 and perhaps 1 kW/m^2 at a good spot on the ground. You would have to keep the collector perpendicular to the sun in either case, and unless you were way way out, the sun will still go behind the earth. This might be easier for something way up high, but still. And if you are trying to beam EM energy down upon an antenna assembly, you have a similar geometric problem unless you keep the satellite directly overhead.

If microwaving energy around is such a great idea, why don't we instead beam it from a remote solar farm, say in Australia, hitting an orbiting "mirror" , and reflecting it down elsewhere?

JB

Speaking of questionable solutions, did anyone see the wild cold fusion speculations from Michael McKubre on 60 minutes tonight - the middle segment? Electric current + deuterium + palladium will solve our problems.

http://www.cbs.com/primetime/60_minutes/video/video.php?cid=60%20Minutes...

or http://tinyurl.com/c3jgxb

Apart from the obvious cost difficulties, this faces many practical difficulties, too. To be able to beam back to a single station, the satellite would have to be in geosynchronous orbit - about 36,000km up. Getting it up there takes a lot more energy than to low earth orbit where we put the space station and the like. At first that looks like just a cost issue, but it underpins many of the technical issues I outline below.

The first issue is that if you have a 1km² mylar sheet, the solar wind (the stream of particles it blasts into space along with its heat) and the very light it's designed to capture will blow the satellite out of position over time. The solar wind is such that people have actually planned spacecraft which use it to travel around the solar system. You can have manouvering rockets on board to counter this, but that uses up fuel - and you have to get the fuel up there, too, a few times over the several decades lifetime of the satellite.

Secondly, the Earth has a magnetosphere, that is its magnetic field shields it somewhat from high-energy particles from the Sun. Craft high up don't have that protection (which is one of the problems with long-range spaceflight, both manned and unmanned) and so would need to be heavily shielded (increasing the non-productive weight to put up there), or else would occasionally get blasted and destroyed. Repairs would be difficult to say the least.

Thirdly, beaming the energy back to Earth is difficult. As anyone who's ever had an electric torch knows, light spreads out. You can tighten the beam somewhat, but still over thousands of kilometres it'll spread out. So either your receiving station is really huge or else you lose a good chunk of the energy; if you're losing the energy anyway, why bother putting the station in space, the whole purpose of which was to get more energy?

Fourthly, the building of the thing would require several launches, and assembly in space. The International Space Station was planned for 12 years before the first modules were launched into orbit, and has been in construction for 10 years, still not finished - and it's only in Low Earth Orbit, not the geosynchronous orbit this thing would require.

Fifthly, geosynchronous orbit is already pretty crowded. Basically it's the plum spot for communications and spy satellites. It's one thing to whack another table-sized sat up there, it's another to put a 1km² satellite up there.

The first and fifth points combine to make a maintenance nightmare. At orbital velocities of kilometres per second, the tiniest speck of dust becomes deadlier than a bullet. It whacks into the mylar sheet and makes a hole. Then the solar wind pulls on the sheet and tears that little hole into a big long rip. Much less or no power is produced by the thing. Then your power satellite is pushed more on one side than the other, and starts spinning.

You better have a lot of spare fuel on board, and a crew ready to head up there and repair it. You can't just chuck the old mylar sheet away, that's 1km² of rubbish floating around in orbit at several kilometres per second, other satellite owners - especially those owning other power satellites - won't appreciate that kind of litter. So you have to roll it up. Fancy rolling up a 1km² sheet? Do you know how to? Nope, neither does NASA or anyone else, no-one's had to do it before.

So even if the launches were completely free, there are a LOT of technical obstacles in the way of this kind of satellite.

Seems a lot easier to build the thing on the ground. I mean, does the Earth really lack big empty spaces for us to build power stations in? Not Australia, that's for bloody sure.

Removed.

An RF (Radio Frequency) power generation system might have an electrical efficiency of 80%. In this case of a 200 MW transmitter, the power output would be 160 MW and the heat generated in the space based system would be 40 MW. This heat would have to be removed by radiation to space. I'll leave it to the thermo folks to calculate the heat rise. Earth based thermal power plants have large bodies of water available for this function.

Totally nuts. Where are the EROEI true believers when you need them to shoot this down? Maybe I've been too successful in pointing out the fallacies of EROEI.

Solaren technology is frought with technology design issues from beginning to end.

Read their patents.

Their concept in Geo is fictional science.

Their is a great design an American is working with Japan on that is superior
in everyway to this Solaren technology.

I'm tellin' ya: stratospheric dirigibles/balloons hauling a microwave transmitter and coated with thin-film PV. They fly above the weather, they're cheap to make, and they're easy to maintain.

If helium availability is an issue, design them to be self-heating hot-air style balloons.

If beamed solar power can work, this has to be a vastly cheaper solution than launching satellites.

Ack! Double post.

Putting the same money into conservation and distributed generation would be much better for the future coming at us.

Negawatts (wikipedia)
Distributed generation (wikipedia)

Well actually I think this is the perfect project. Vast sums of money, development of new tech that doesn't exist, big attention getting rockets, probable involvement of the pentagon. Much better than the Hydrogen Economy. Demitri Orlov would be proud at America's ability to hasten collapse.

Paul

Space-based solar shares the vulnerabilities of all centralized power generation and transmission systems to attack, sabotage, or space weather. The more centralized, the wider is the potential catastrophe, especially if recovery of gird requires months or years. (Larger, more specialized gear is harder to replace, etc.)

Security and resilience are to be found in distributed generation and a less centralized grid that can be broken up into smaller portions to facilitie management of disruptions and recovery from blackouts.

While enlarging the network may bring lower costs in the short- and medium-term, the risk is of greater catastrophe down the road. (Which you can ignore if your discount rate is high enough.)

What's wrong with my argument??

I'll second howleyj's argument above that a single failpoint for the cost is quite silly, but I'll add maintenance problems to the argument.

For me while i love the science fiction on this, I don't think the answer to large centralized power stations...is creating the largest most centralized power station ever made!

It's like saying the answer to the SUV is a Hummer the size of an aircraft carrier, and is pretty much the same psychological disorder with all technical solutions. This is not how to correct our way of life. We should be moving in the opposite direction, towards personal power; ground thermal, passive solar etc which on a personal level is plenty.

The safety factor just isn't there. We'd be a single metric to imperial math error or software glitch away from the microwaves missing the rectenna, thus frying Toronto (or where ever) in the process...

More importantly though, as we enter the Post Carbon Age, quite literally how would we send an orbiter to go fix it? All long term space projects are now over (sorry to burst your bubble). Even if it worked, it could never be repaired again.

If people want their Hummer in the sky, might as well go for the space elevator while we're at it, and avoid the whole transmission and transit problem together. Then humanity never needs to use rockets to reach orbit again, and can have a solar station at the tip. If it doesn't get pulverized by all the junk up there, then it'll work and we can save our fuel.

This would at least put our dwindling resources to theraputic use if all practical uses are beyond us now.

But if we spent those billions on changing how we live to begin with, we wouldn't even need the electricity generated by this system.

So, no, this isn't a solution. Just more evidence that we haven't a clue.

Ach! So many errors and misconceptions, so little time to (try to) straighten them out. Hardly know where to begin...

I can say with full confidence that the Solaren proposal -- at least as it has been reported recently -- is junk. But none of the comments so far have nailed the reason. Most reveal a good deal of ignorance about SSP, its problems, and its potentials.

Lets start with an easy one. Each square meter of collecting surface for a geosynchronous solar power satellite will produce about six times as much energy per day as a comparable collector in a "good" earthside location. Not because the sun is six times brighter in space; it's only about 35% brighter, as somebody already noted. But it's available at full normal incidence 24 hours a day -- except for brief periods of eclipse at times near the spring and fall equinoxes. A fixed collector on earth only sees full normal incidence for a brief period around noon. Nor is there any derating for dust that gathers on the collector surface between washings, or for cloud cover. So, ceteris paribus, a solar cell would pay back its manufacturing energy debt six times faster in GSO than at the best earthside locations. (Of course, in reality, the ceteris is not remotely paribus.)

The real problem with the idea of any near-term prototype SPS delivering 100 MW to an earthside rectenna is that it runs afoul of the laws of microwave optics. A 100 MW rectenna, if Solaren stuck to the 250 W/m² maximum power density of the reference study and its 2.54 GHz transmission frequency, would have a diameter of about 1km. To put 90% of its radiated power into a 1 km circle at distance of 36,000 km, a 2.54 GHz transmitting antenna (12 cm wavelength) would need an aperture about 5 km across. And for reasons that I'm not about to get into here, that would have to be a true "filled" aperture. A synthetic aperture created from a handful of widely spaced transmitters won't work. There is no way in hell that anybody would be able to build a 5 km filled aperture transmitter in space from four comsat launches.

Of course, they could reduce the size of the transmitter a bit by going to a higher frequency power beam, but then they run into an assortment of difficulties. For one thing, it's hard to generate a higher frequency power beam with any degree of efficiency. And at the sort of frequencies that would be required to make a significant difference in the transmitting aperture, atmospheric attenuation becomes a problem.

In the long term, if we manage to survive, SPS could be a viable option for the world's electricity supply. It doesn't require any radical new technologies -- just 30 years or so of appropriate space infrastructure development. SPS will make sense if and when we build lunar colonies and achieve large scale manufacturing in space. Until then, it's a pipe dream.

it strikes me that a number of the people commenting on this story are not thinking seriously about the scale of a project like this. it is clearly not going to provide large quantities of cheap sustainable electrical energy and magically solve the energy crisis. that's obvious. if a utility wants to enhance its technological credentials by investing several millions in a technology like this, particularly in pd&g's market, one of the most tech-friendly societies on the planet, shouldn't that be a positive thing?

it will not help them meet their renewables requirement; but early positioning in a market like sbsp, potentially a hugely disruptive technology with obvious applications in the space sector, would seem to be a good bet. they will spend orders of magnitude more capital developing terrestrial solar power projects, including close-to-market r&d like hvdc.

projects like this prove concepts; later, they validate designs. if it can be compared to fusion, it's a sensible comparison in that the science is known to work. investment in blue-sky technology is sane and justified in any climate. would we have the renewable technologies that are already enabling distributed generation and a sustainable energy network without blue-sky investment in the 1950s and 60s? even now thin-film technologies, blue-sky in the 90s, are changing the rules of the game.

TL;DR this isn't a story about a 'technological solution to our energy needs', something that will take away from every individual's interest in maximising efficiency to minimise cost; it's speculative investment in a potentially disruptive technology.

There's one thing I'm missing in the story and the comments so far. GSO is close to the outer Van Allen radiation belt and can sometimes be in it. Large numbers of high speed charged particles are not very friendly to thin sheet metal structures and reflective surfaces, as well as sheet type solar panels. This is already problematic in communication and weather satellites but they and their solar panels can be overdesigned. Not so with the flimsy structures which are needed for SBSP. Does anyone have any figures on how it influences the service life of SBSP satellites?