Re:How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm
by Tloewald on Thursday April 24, 2014 @08:23PM
(#7643991)
Assuming you wave a magic wand and get rid of the technical and cost issues, you then run into thermal pollution. You're collecting heat from space and beaming it to Earth and then inefficiently converting it to electricity.
Re:How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm
by austinz on Thursday April 24, 2014 @09:41PM
(#7644264)
According to [1], the surface of Earth receives 89,300 terawatts of power from the Sun on average. According to the stats at [2], world power consumption in 2008 was ~17 TW. So even if we could somehow build the tens of thousands of these power plants necessary to completely supply the Earth's power needs, and assuming that none of the consumed power ended up being radiated back into space, we would only be affecting the Earth's energy budget by 0.02%.
Re:How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm
by Tloewald on Friday April 25, 2014 @10:52AM
(#7646848)
So with a magic wand and an incredible amount of money we'll only make the problem slightly worse.
And it's not clear how slightly -- climate change is being caused by accumulation of greenhouse gases during a period of reduced solar output (cyclical fluctuation of 0.1%). BTW 0.02% seems like a lot more when compared to the sun's cyclical variation of 0.1% (which has measurable effects) and suspected historical variations of perhaps 3% that caused ice ages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08...
In terms of the cost of putting materials into space, isn't that the exact problem SpaceX is trying to solve? Right now, it would be economic folly to build one of these things. In decades or centuries, when we have moon colonies and/or asteroid mining and can do all the large-scale fabrication in situ, SSP could very well be significantly cheaper than other forms of power generation.