[AR] Re: 500,000 tons

  • From: Ben Brockert <wikkit@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 15:15:18 -0600

For the love of FSM, please, go, build a successful and highly
profitable SBSB company and prove us all wrong. Just stop wanking
about it on a rocketry mailing list.

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Rüdiger Klaehn <rklaehn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Uwe Klein <uwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Am 06.05.2014 02:32, schrieb James Bowery:
>>>
>>> About 5 years ago I did a blog post titled "Arrival of the Solar Power
>>> Satellite
>>>
>>> <http://jimbowery.blogspot.com/2009/07/ive-been-following-space-solar-power.html>"
>>>
>>> and did a rough calculation that, based on the Powersat patents, it
>>> would take 20,000 Falcon9 launches to loft 250GW capacity and the total
>>> installed capacity would be under $3/W.  If you do that over the course
>>
>> Medium scale Photovoltaics are now @ ~1€/Wp here ( Germany )
>>
>>
>
> 3 USD per watt of _continuous_ power from a solar power satellite is much
> more economical than 1 EUR per watt for seasonal, intermittent power with a
> capacity factor of less than 0.1 (in Germany). You would need 10W of
> terrestrial solar for the same _average_ power production. But producing
> power when power is cheap is not economical without subsidies. So you would
> need 13W of terrestrial solar power (because of storage inefficiencies) and
> maybe a month of storage to have roughly the same capability for base load
> production. I guess space solar power will have a hard time being
> competitive with ground solar power in places like California and the
> American south west where there is plenty of sun and cheap property. But in
> places like Germany where there is very little sun and property is very
> expensive, it will be much easier to be competitive.
>
> Good luck finding a place for the huge pumped storage plants that would be
> necessary for storing energy on a large scale. Every time somebody proposes
> to build pumped storage in Germany, the environmentalists are up in arms
> about it. See the proposed Schluchseewerk or Jochberg pumped storage
> facilities.
>
>
> In fact I think providing peak power could be a niche for space solar power
> to grow in until it is cheap enough for base power. You are already
> transmitting energy over 36000km. You can easily redirect the power to the
> other side of the world in seconds by just moving the beam. So you might as
> well take advantage of this to provide power to wherever in the world it is
> most valuable at the moment.
>
> If you imagine a world mostly powered by intermittent power sources like
> solar and wind, there will always be places where there demand exceeds
> supply and energy costs are therefore very high (*). For solar power, there
> is a mismatch between demand and supply in the morning and especially the
> evening. And of course there are large fluctuations due to cloud cover and
> seasons. For wind there are also large fluctuations that can last several
> weeks to months.
>
> If you had receivers near most large consumers around the world, you could
> follow the seasonal, daily and even hourly demand/supply mismatch. The
> economical advantage is huge: while bulk base/off-peak energy costs less
> than 5 cents per kWh in most countries, peak energy costs up to 10 times
> more. Of course, to take advantage of this you would need a design where the
> receiver is relatively cheap (maybe infrared laser power transmission to
> tethered stratospheric platforms). But that is exactly what is required for
> a small prototype power plant anyway.
>
> (*) Providing full backup using gas power plants is becoming uneconomical
> for the few days per year that backup is needed. In Germany, extremely
> efficient gas power plants are being shut down because they are
> uneconomical, while lignite coal power plants thrive.
>
>>
>>> of 5 years that's an average of about of one Falcon9 launch every 2
>>> hours.
>>>
>>> The calculations I went through are pretty simple so any bad assumptions
>>> or calculation errors should stand out.
>>>
>> Ever looked at the carbon footprint for those PowerSats ;-?
>>
> If it is cheap enough to be economical without subsidies, it will
> automatically have an EROI (energy return on investment) of much more than
> 1. It is just in heavily subsidized markets like corn ethanol that something
> can be economical without having a positive EROI.
>
>>
>> Uwe
>>
>>
>

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