Solar power in space, a really stupid idea

The New York Times has an article about solar power satellites (SPS). This is where you put a few square mile of solar panels up in space and then just beam the power down to earth with microwaves. This idea was so loony and so farcical on it’s face that I about had a conniption fit. Well, this is the great thing about the Internet. See, the New York Times allows comments on its articles and they soon had six pages of comments, many from engineers like ourselves that pointed out how incredibly stupid this idea was. A few years ago the Times would have received a dozen letters critical of the article and maybe published one or maybe killed them and nobody is the wiser. Now they get 143 comments, mostly con, that suddenly appear and the whole world can see how absurd the proposals in the article are. And I love the researcher that comments, “What would it hurt to spend about 100 million on further research?” Well not his house payment, but we peons have better things to research with our tax dollars. Like why the seam of my blue jeans’ legs curl up when they come out of the dryer. I always wondered about that.

Just as sad, of all the comments with good reasoned analysis, the comment the Times put on the first page in a little highlighted box was:

"Energy from space really is one of the crucial ‘three pillars’ of renewable electricity, along with wind and thermal solar farms." Dr. Paul J. Werbos, Arlington, Va.

That was pretty unbelievable to me, but just look the first paragraph of the article itself:

As we face $4.50 a gallon gas, we also know that alternative energy sources — coal, oil shale, ethanol, wind and ground-based solar — are either of limited potential, very expensive, require huge energy storage systems or harm the environment. There is, however, one potential future energy source that is environmentally friendly, has essentially unlimited potential and can be cost competitive with any renewable source: space solar power.

This is a flat-out lie. It’s a lie in so many places it hurts my teeth. Sweeping all the alternative energy sources under the rug, without looking at the complex analog tradeoffs involved is an affront to reason and decency. That is a bad enough lie. But to then follow that absurdity with the assertion that space solar power is somehow economically possible and environmentally friendly is complete madness. Now I am going to give some sources you can read that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this proposal is clinically insane, but first I wanted to share an epiphany I had. Paul’s epiphany came about 5 hours into a wasted Thursday night where I should have been in downtown San Jose having fun at the free concert. Instead I spent all night reading all the sources I could find regarding SPS. I am embarrassed because it took five hours to realize something that was plainly stated in the comments to the article that I read five hours before. Someone pointed out that the technology of this proposal did not matter. This space-panel microwave gizmo was also a weapon and it would be politically impossible to deploy it.

Wow, hours of my personal time down the drain before the epiphany. The epiphany was that this thing was exactly that, a weapon. That is why NASA researched it in the 1980s, that is what all the feasibility studies were about and that is why it is being floated out there right now. The military industrial complex wants to test how stupid we are. If the American people are dumb enough to believe that solar panels in space is even the slightest bit possible then they can use that cover as they do what they really want to do, make a death machine. The images of the Terminator movies and SkyNet are too chilling to even contemplate.

Now there may be some Pollyanna types that think our wonderful government is way too nice to ever try and develop a death machine. Sorry, for those of you that think the United States Government is more like a fluffy little fabric softener sheet tumbling around the dryer, making everything silky smooth and smelling fresh, well, news flash: Governments are about coercion. Force, killing, jails, waterboards, and the rest are the essential nature and job of the government. Sure they hand out a bunch of middle class entitlements to stay in power and keep the sheep bleating happy sounds, but the core nature and purpose of governments is forcing people to do things. Most of the less naive among us are OK with that. After all, I am sitting on a lovely little parcel of land that was stolen from the Mexicans, who stole it from the Spanish priests, who stole it from the Portuguese priests, who stole it from the Indians, who stole it from each other for 10,000 years. Works for me, I just planted some cactus in the front yard. Of course I will be complaining about the effective 45% tax rate we engineers have to suffer till the day I die, I hate the government forcing me to do that. But I will just kind of skirt around the benefits all the killing and mayhem provided me. After all, I deserve a happy little Domicile of the Future here in sunny Sunnyvale. I have a title to prove it is all mine. I am glad my government stole the land for me, just like I am glad Burger King shoots a rod into a cow’s head so I can have a tasty burger with none of the emotional baggage. Who wants to drive a nail into Elsie’s skull?

OK, still doubtful that NASA, our beloved space program would try to fund a death machine under the cover of alternative energy? Well, you didn’t have the benefit of working at several military contractors, like I did. When you work at those places you invariable meet people who think in military terms. One of them told me twenty years ago that the entire space program was a military operation. I was incredulous. He patiently explained. See, warfare has always been about controlling the high ground. If you could control the plains while the enemy was in the ditch, you won. If you controlled the hill while the enemy was on the plain, you won. If you control the mountain while the enemy is on the hill, you won. If you controlled the airplanes while the enemy was on the mountain, you won. OK, news flash, live at five, film at eleven: If you control space while the enemy is in an airplane, you win. The military types at those military contractors told me what was already pretty apparent—that there is no sensible scientific reason to put people in space. All the science is much much much cheaper if you don’t need to launch life support. Sure astronauts do maintenance on the Hubble telescope, but for what we spent developing the shuttle, especially when you count the dead astronauts, we could have sent up a dozen Hubble telescope and just let the broken ones fall out of orbit. The space station is a prototype AWAC and this solar-power death-machine is a prototype AC-130. And remember, for the $100 billion we spent on the space station, every American household could get 952 dollars for gasoline.

Trust me on this one; this solar power in space stuff is a military research project to make a death machine. Then things start to makes sense technologically and sociologically. Some of the most severe limitations of the system go away when it is a weapon. There is no need for constant maintenance since it is used intermittently. There is no need for a geostationary orbit, you want to be able to kill people anywhere, including and maybe especially inside the US borders. Keeping us in control is just as important as killing foreigners. Heck you don’t even need a geosynchronous orbit. You can put the death machine in low earth orbit. That saves a huge amount of cost and dispenses with fantasy proposals like the NASA guy that said we should build them on the moon and then bring them down. I started to ask myself if these idiots have even been in a semiconductor fab, much less one on the moon, but see, then I realized, Doctorates are not stupid. The government needed some fantasy cover story to keep the research going in the face of the fact that the power would cost not 10, not 100 not 1000 but about 10,000 times more than terrestrial based power of any form.

Ok, sorry to all you hard-core technical types for that diatribe, but I did not want you spending 5 hours researching this like I did without understanding this is death machine proposal, not an alternative energy proposal. Here are the sources. The URSI (Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale) has a nice web page as well as an identical pdf that debunks most of the SPS proposals. They seem to make an error when they say you need 10,000m2 to receive 14GW solar flux. With 1.37 kW/m2 solar flux I see it as a million square meters, a solar panel 1 km on a side. The 14 GW is reduced to 1 GW by the 7% system efficiency they describe. The paper is very neutral, unlike some of my ham buddies that would just say; “You want to beam a gigawatt of RF energy into the atmosphere, and then build a whole bunch of them? Are you out of your f*(&^ing mind?” This paper has references, both pro and con and it is the con ones that have the good reading. One good resource is S. Fetter, “Space Solar Power: An Idea Whose Time Will Never Come?,” (pdf). Where you might want to start is just read all the comments in the NY Times article. Read all 6 pages.

I will try to summarize the basic arguments:

SPS Pro

1. Solar flux density in space is 1.37 kW/m2 as opposed to 1 kW/m2 in Arizona at noon.
2. The solar collector can work all day since a geostationary orbit is 24,000 miles up, directly over the equator, and the earth does not shadow the collector. There are no clouds in space.

SPS Con

1. Economics. This is just madness, bat-shiat crazy stuff if your goal is to generate commercial electric power. Launch costs, maintenance costs, safety costs are, literally, astronomical.
2. Politics. Like the commentator said, this is a weapon, and by the time we develop it China will have the technology and international standing to nuke Cape Canaveral to keep us from putting it in space.
3. Technology. The end-to-end efficiency is 7%. The URSI used 13% solar panels, and Sunpower’s are 17% and they promise 22%, but the URSI article points out you would want to use amorphous silicon for the weight advantage and there’s your 13%. The inefficiency of the radio beam means the microwave inefficiency, easily 400 MW on a 1GW installation, would directly heat the atmosphere. And we were doing this for what, global warming? The solar wind damages the panels; they will have to be constantly replaced. One commenter to the article worked on a study and pointed out we would have to launch every two weeks for years just to get one in space and then just keep launching them every two weeks for maintenance. Making the phased array antennae and receiver is a huge technological challenge. Since it is too big to prototype on earth you have to count on computer simulations. Yeah, this should end well.
4. Safety. You are trying to aim a microwave beam at a 4-kilometer spot from 24,000 miles up. What could possibly go wrong?
5. Ecology. You will vaporize any bird or animal that gets into the beam. You will punch a hole through the clouds 24/7 where the beam comes down. Who knows the affect on the ionosphere or the earth’s magnetic field?
6. Security. For a power plant the installation has to be in geostationary orbit. That is directly above the equator. So if you beam the power straight down the receiver has to be on the equator as well. In addition to the security nightmare, you will still have to run wires from the equator to wherever the power is needed. Else you have to obliquely aim the thing and that is a real mess.
7. Fantasy. Come on, even non-technical people have to see that putting up factories on the moon, to save money making this thing, is complete BS. Ignoring the maintenance issues and real-world engineering for ivory-tower science-fair nonsense is equally fantastical.
8. Health. Having all these microwaves beaming around may cause cancer or other problems. If it comes down to 60 Hz or microwaves I will take 60 Hz any day.
9. Interference. Pumping gigawatts of RF into our atmosphere is sure to ruin a lot of radio communications that operate at nine orders of magnitude lower power levels or more. The URSI report points out that radio telescopes would be unusable. In addition all you RF folks know that there will be side-lobes and spurs and harmonics on the 2.4 or 5.8 GHz so there will be huge swaths of higher frequencies that will now be unusable for radio communications since the gigawatt space power stations are blasting them out of the air.

I guess there are other objections but the sun is coming up and I have to get to work, real work with a real job at a real company that maybe the NY Times should use to vet incredibly stupid stories like this. Our government is using the Times like a useful idiot, having them print and lend credence to an idea that can only be used as a death machine. Now, I am not saying we should not have a space-based death-machine. In a world where unemployed dirtbags fly jetliners into office buildings, maybe a death machine that cooks people like Jimmy Dean pork sausages that have fallen into the campfire is a great idea. And it will leave all their buildings and stuff for us to use afterwards. But if we are going to discuss this as a free people and pay for it with our taxes, we have to make clear we are researching a death machine and not alternative energy.

One last thing. I hope nobody thinks I am against solar power. I wrote a blog that pointed out that solar is still not economical but I made an error in my econometric model. See I figured the cost of electricity as 13 cents a kW/h. I figured that was generous since that was California power rates and that most people not in California pay way less. Well when I wrote that I was paying electricity for the Office/loft/warehouse/shop/consulting-place megaplex. That was industrial power and was a flat rate. Now that I am at the Domicile of the Future, I got my first residential California electric bill a month ago and, yeah, we pay 13 cents for the baseline amount. But since I have air-conditioning, I paid 32 cents/kWh for a good chunk of electricity. So I am all for solar power if it makes economic sense (without government subsidies, I really do not think it is moral to tax my neighbors so I can have a solar installation). Well it seems now that the thing is to use solar to keep your house from exceeding the 13-cent baseline rate. I will scratch my head and work up another analysis to see if solar panels pay out on that basis.

Meanwhile I do have a couple of ideas. One is for a solar installation that is not grid-tied. I wonder if any one makes a system where the panels just power a dc motor that runs a heat-pump. Then I can have air-conditioning (or heat) and not have to use PG&E. The other idea is to have the panels hinged down the middle on the peak of my roofline, which runs north-south. That way I can get some benefit of tracking in a gross way. In the morning a servo or timer can plop the panels on the east-facing roof, then maybe track the sun till noon, where the panel will look “balanced” on the roof peak, and then follow the sun down so that the panels end up lying against the west-facing roof. Even if they did not track but only flopped from one side to the other at noon, it would provide more power than if they were fixed to the roof. If anyone knows of any hardware like either of these ideas, let me know.