The Toronto Star is reporting that a US government study is recommending a more detailed study of solar power plants in space to beam power down to Earth.
The article, in a burst of technical understanding surprising from today's mainstream media, raised the question of whether the resources spent creating such power plants and putting them in space would exceed the power they produce.
For comparison, I've seen studies which suggest that the total lifecycle power output of a solar power plant on Earth is negative - that it does take more power to build it, run it, and decomission it than it produces. A plant in space, of course, wouldn't need to worry about cloud cover and thus could be much smaller for the same nominal power output, and could dispense with the necessary power-storage systems a terrestrial plant must have as a bonus. To balance that, it would take considerable energy to lift the plant into space and construct the ground stations to recieve the power. What would the net effect be? Well, I have no idea, but it seems that studying the problem would be a good thing.
The article also stated that over the past 50 years the US government has spent $21 billion on research into fusion. I'm glad we're looking at that, but dissapointed that at $400 million or so a year we haven't come up with anything. Especially since a 1st-order estimate for the cost of a space elevator (which, BTW, would massively reduce the cost of setting up, say, a set of orbiting solar power stations) is only $10 billion.
Personally, I'm inclined to favor any project that increases our presence in space - that's our future, and the sooner we learn to live and work there, the better.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I don't think it's our future. Maybe it's naive of me, but if we were meant to live up there, we would be able to without having to bring our own air.
I sort of believe that G-d will provide. Not in the miracle sense, but in the sense that he will help us to learn what we need to learn to make this world work. He built it for us....
But if you believe that we were meant only to live on Earth, doesn't that also mean we're only meant to live here for a limited time? Sooner or later our sun will go nova, and destroy Earth, and that will be it for the human race.
Perhaps it is just me, but I can't see any god creating the universe only to have us spend a few tens of millenia on one planet and then die out. If whatever created the universe also created us, I think they want us to explore as much of it as possible.
We needed to build ships to sail between the continents; we'll build other ships to sail between planets.
Post a Comment