Europe Is Getting Serious About Making Space-Based Solar Power a Reality
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
Area is not remotely a limit, so the real question is can your space boondoggle go up for <10x the price per nameplate watt without wrecking the ionosphere, eliminating 2.4GHz comms, damaging ecology, and being unavailable to the 70% of the world that don't have a space program?
Then even if you do that, is the petajoules of energy you need to put it up there ever going to pay off or are you better off just burning the thousands of tonnes of methane or hydrogen required?
I'm pretty sure these numbers are completely false for central Europe.
The article claims that someone wants to put power stations in space and transmit the power over long distances. If you're willing to do long-distance transmission (to central Europe), there are enough low-population area with much sunlight in winter, and the technology to generate solar power on the surface of the planet is cheap and getting cheaper.
Like where? And are they under the political control of Europe? If not, then they're useless.
Solar requires surprisingly little space. The city where I live now generates about 90% as much renewable electricity as its total average use, and it doesn't really show. Visitors don't say "wow, there really are a lot of solar panels here!" or anything like that. You don't have to look far to find some solar panels, and there a few geothermal facilities, but it's not immediately noticeable. It's been retrofitted to a densely populated city and doesn't really show.
Not really. If i look on average production for utility-scale power plants (e.g. [0]), i get average net production of 5 MW/km^2. Germany has average total primary energy consumption ~387 TW, so to satisfy it with solar, one would need to use ~20% of Germany area for solar power plants.
It is very rough estimate, on one hand, primary energy is often less efficient than electricity, on the other hand, it completely ignores the issue of seasonality of solar power, just comparing yearly averages.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4nnersdorf_Solar_Park
Moreover, the existence of a plant at 53 degrees with under half the capacity factor achievablein europe is strong evidence for the thesis that solar is both sufficiently cheap and small, otherwise it would have been built near munich, not hamburg.
Moreover you need to compare like for like. When the proposal is to spend tens or hundreds of euros per net watt on multi junction panels that can handle shock loads of 1000s of Gs using launch capabilities that don't exist, then compare against something other than the cheapest available previous generation modules.
A 29% efficient hybrid silicon perovskite panel would be an example. This would produce double to triple the net wattage again as they perform much better in partial cloud or with sunlight further from normal and with realistic projections for cost would be around €1 to €2 per net watt installed as a dedicated facility including land.
In total you're around a factor of 5-15 over what is necessary.
A reasonable proposal then puts your "20%" figure at something more like just putting panels on top of the built up and paved areas starting south of Nuremberg and only going north when you run out of space. So to conclude
> Solar requires surprisingly little space
No
Here's an article from Eric Berger; see the section on drawbacks: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/european-space-chief...
Power prices show huge temporal, seasonal, and geographic variance. So LCOE (Levelized Cost Of Energy - i.e. average cost) arguments miss that the ability to sell power when power prices are high is critical. Key thing that SBSP as an idea has going for it is high capacity factors at the time of high prices.
To your point, if the idea is to succeed, someone would have to make a SBSP plant that is way less complex than current proposals.
For low grade heat you can just store it directly using some black pipes at $5/kWh of storage skipping the electrolysis and the pv steps.
Might need some kind of cleaning after 5 years, but it should break even especially if scale pushes prices down a bit.
I'm all for countries cooperating, but we need to be aware of Europe's recent historical experience on finding reliable sources of energy and raw materials. Specifically: 1) Russia using Europe's money to fund it's invasion of Ukraine and blackmail the continent. 2) Colonial experiences in North Africa. Which, to Europe's credit, it's not interested in repeating. As only solar in north aferica can really solve the winter solar insolation issue - Europe is simply too far north.
To go to 100% carbon free you need "clean firm" power. And there's no real way to get that with out one of: Nuclear, Geothermal, SBSP, or Fusion. Plenty of arguments for Nuclear, but we need to admit there's a very short list of potential solutions here.
They tried that with Russia and look where it got them. Working with dictatorships for your critical energy needs is always a bad idea.
And if they had decent reactors, sourcing enough Uranium wouldn't be hard either.
Europe is neither willing to invest in the rocket technology to make this happen nor has committed to financing of the solar based power or the necessary ground system.
And beyond space based solar is mostly a really bad idea anyway.
But I guess some people in Europe and specially Germany are willing to finance anything other then nuclear.
Why is it a bad idea? The amount of sunlight striking Europe (esp. northern Europe) in the winter is basically useless for solar power generation.
France is so jelly of RocketLab that they spend a large sum of money to have its own micro-launcher despite the market already being hilariously flooded with companies.
If you want solar power in Northern Europe, just put collectors into southern Europe and put a DC long distance power transport line.
But why would you want solar? Norway and Sweden are already mostly green because of hydro and nuclear.
The alternative is not getting the space-based solar power working for a very long time. They don't have the launch capacity. Also, they can do both, you know. It's not like they have to choose to forever give up all work on their launch industry to do one big project.
>If you want solar power in Northern Europe, just put collectors into southern Europe and put a DC long distance power transport line.
This might be doable, but it'd be interesting to see a good analysis comparing the two. Southern Europe is still pretty far north if you look at a globe, and doesn't get that much sunlight in the winter (though the southern tip of Italy is certainly better than Denmark, for instance). HVDC will still have significant losses over that distance, though I don't know how that compares to microwave transmission from space.
>But why would you want solar? Norway and Sweden are already mostly green because of hydro and nuclear.
Hydro is unsustainable and is not scalable. It's completely tapped out in developed nations, and it also causes huge ecosystem destruction. Nuclear is unpopular, and apparently having serious problems in France currently.
I mean, if you have followed the politics of European space, sure, in a fantasy world they just have money to do everything.
In reality they don't even want to spend a fraction of the money for either project.
> Hydro is unsustainable and is not scalable. It's completely tapped out in developed nations
Its not tapped out in Norway or Iceland but there is enough already, they don't need more.
> Nuclear is unpopular, and apparently having serious problems in France currently.
It has serious problem in France because the anti-nuclear forced tried to destroy nuclear for the last 10 years and deliberately stopped investing and maintaining. They want to force the reduction of nuclear. Arguable nuclear has been politically embattled for much longer.
And whatever problem nuclear might have, compared to the problems of space solar its a small problem.
Apparently, Europe as a whole needs a lot more. Iceland is too far from mainland Europe to be any kind of electricity supplier anyway, and Norway is problematic too because power lines would have to cross the Baltic, so I don't see these as useful either.
I have been pro nuclear for a long time, it was the solution in 1970 and its still the solution today.
So for me there really isn't much of a problem. I have just been watching this slow train driving against a wall for decades now.
>> just put collectors into southern Europe and put a DC long distance power transport line.
That is technically non trivial, and NIMBY across central Europe, looking at you Germany, is making close to impossible. We already fail getting wind from Holstein to Bavaria because people refuse to have power lines above ground close by. Or wind turbines, although that is changing.
Those kind of long distance DC power-lines would be blow the earth I would assume.
And yes, those powerlines have to be underground because above ground is not feasible for political and public opinion reasons. And they are orders of magnitude more expensive. Connecting power grids is no trivial task, the powerlines are actually among easier things.
> And they are orders of magnitude more expensive.
Not compared to space based solar.
> Connecting power grids is no trivial task
Europes power system is already very highly integrated.
Germany kick startes solar early on only to have our lunch eaten bybthe Chinese manufacturers. Non the less, solar already was in 2018 cheaper then Hinckley, cheaper than coal and cheaper than gas per kWh in auctions for utility scale projects, same for wind. No idea why people still try ti ridicule solar and wind in 2022 if all numbers show something different.
Had Germany done the Grühnewende with mass constructing nuclear they would be done by now and likely German companies would be building nuclear plants in Poland and likely many other countries.
Germany could have spend the next 50 years building nuclear plants all over the world.
Honckley is a terrible example. Everybody know if you build a single PWR in a country with very little experiance its not gone be worth it. You need to build many to get learning effects, educate the work force.
If they had done that they could be finishing multible plants a year at a very cheap price. And that is even assume they built shitty PWRs rather then some next generation reactors.
Solar and Wind without Storage look good in the statistics but on a systematic level it causes many isses as well. Storage is still not solved so fossile will stay for a while yet. And even if you have storage a single matural disaster can cause a shortfall of electricity that overwhelms your storage.
Not to mention far more waste, far less attractive in term of livable envoironments. More land use and so on.
Currently I think the power mostly flows in Morocco's direction.
There's at least one british team looking to directly link the Moroccon power to the UK via sea-cables, skipping Spain/France.
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
At the other end of the Mediterreanean I think Cyprus and Isreal are linking up power giving another European grid entry point.
Nothing else would.
Keeping them pointed the right way would be hard. Maybe they would point at a much smaller secondary mirror responsible for sweeping the beam as Earth turns under it.
This really is a bad idea all around. Europe would better build solar farms in the tropics driving ammonia synthesizers, and ship that north to use in existing NG burners.
CERN is the first counter-example that comes to mind.
And in pure fusion research terms, having 100 smaller research project over that time period would have yielded far more results.
The technology relevant for fusion is evolving fast and ITER is already 2 technology generations behind.
But I agree with you, Europe has the capacity to invest if they get ideas in their head. But this space based solar I do not think has that broad a support base.