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The general concept of beaming power from point A to point B using microwaves is itself interesting, and is a nice historical throwback to ideas that Nicolai Te
by photochemsyn 4y ago
The general concept of beaming power from point A to point B using microwaves is itself interesting, and is a nice historical throwback to ideas that Nicolai Tesla was promoting in his later years. However, this is almost certainly little more than a niche market for specific applications, and notions about using giant space-based platforms to collect energy and beam it to earth to power factories, cities, and homes are nothing but unrealistic sci-fi concepts. It's comparable to notions that fossil-fueled global warming could be fixed by parking a giant sunshade out at Lagrange 1.
It's just far more efficient to build solar PV arrays on the ground, and to keep power on 24/7, build enough to store the energy for later use at night and in the winter. Throwing all that mass into orbit, even if in low-Earth orbit where decay and burnup in the atmosphere is guaranteed over time for the debris issue, is just a massive waste of resources, plus the energy loss over 100 km or so would undoubtedly very high.
Here's a list of more realistic applications (with a rather military-industrial flavor, although space exploration applications also exist):
> "At the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, we have spent the better part of the past 15 years looking into different options for power beaming and investigating potential applications. These include extending the flight times and payload capacities of drones, powering satellites in orbit when they are in darkness, powering rovers operating in permanently shadowed regions of the moon, sending energy to Earth’s surface from space, and distributing energy to troops on the battlefield."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/power-beaming https://spectrum.ieee.org/power-beaming
- sjducb 4y agoI disagree with the niche market thing. #1 Military forward operating base #2 Anything that has to be in the middle of nowhere, think mining and agriculture, maybe even oil rigs #3 Shipping, it could make electric container ships viable. #4 Anyone who wants to rent their power, rather than build their own panels. You're shifting CapEx to OpEx. This is why cloud computing took off. You can have any amount of power you need at the flip of a switch. People will pay a massive premium for that.
- photochemsyn 4y agoI think the costs are going to be astronomical, and that's the difference with cloud computing - if it cost 10X as much to use AWS as it did to run your own servers onsite with IT people to manage them, AWS would never have taken off. Likewise, for mining and agriculture, onsite solar/storage is almost certainly going to be much cheaper. Electric container ships are an interesting idea, but even there it might actually be cheaper to just synthesize fuel from water and air. In particular, transmission losses and low efficiency seem to be the fundamental problem. See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31521665
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> Electric container ships are an interesting idea, but even there it might actually be cheaper to just synthesize fuel from water and air. How does one do this without power? And if possible, why isn't it done already?!
- ch4s3 4y agoYou’d do it at the port with nuclear/wind/solar. No one does it now because marine fuel is super cheap.
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- Schroedingersat 4y ago> How does one do this without power? You synthesize the fuel when and where you have power. > And if possible, why isn't it done already?! Hasn't hit cost parity yet. Hydrogen is the cheapest and it's still about triple the price. More portable fuels are more expensive to synthesize and cheaper to mine. Add a carbon tax (bunker fuel is filthy) and watch it happen overnight, or wait until around 2030 when the prices will cross over (but there will be an equilibrium price while capacity is built).
- sjducb 4y agoAWS is 10-100x the cost of on prem. I've got a client who is paying about $300k per year for a postgres instance that is basically my laptop. I think S3 is a loss leader and EC2 is close to cost. Everything else is a massive markup.
- manholio 4y agoFor a given mass of solar panels, the space version is perhaps 50% more efficient, due to the fact they operate in space. Putting them there, in the most optimistic scenario, will cost perhaps 100x versus the ground level version. Currently it's something like 1000x, but let's asume prices go down due to Starship and what not. So you really have to ask what kind of practical scenario affords you to use energy that is at least 60 times more expensive than what is available at ground level (but more realistically, at least 300-400x). Even if you include the capital cost of Li-ion batteries, their wear and tear and road transport for over 1000 miles, you can still get power much cheaper by just trucking batteries around. That, mind you, is before any transmission loses, investment in ground infrastructure etc., it makes no sense to put solar panels in space because the efficiency gains are simply too limited. This leaves the military scenario indeed - which is basically sci-fi, but bras has been known to abandon common sense when planning technology, see the initial Space Shuttle concept, space laser weapons etc.
- DennisP 4y agoPeople drastically underestimate how Starship will change launch costs. Right now they throw away an expensive upper stage with every launch, and even the lower stage only gets used about a dozen times. Starship doesn't throw away anything and it's designed to be used about a thousand times. At scale it's basically just the cost of fuel and ground services, which drops cost by a couple orders of magnitude. The book The Case for Space Solar Power has detailed cost estimates for NASA's SPS-ALPHA design. It was published about a decade ago so has old launch costs. I plugged in Starship costs and got a total cost of $0.04/kWh, which is pretty great for dispatchable power without needing storage.
- kiba 4y agoThe real money comes from using starship to develop spaced based industrial capacity. Instead of manufacturing solar panels on earth, it would be manufactured in space. Once we have real space industry, doing things in orbit would be much cheaper.
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- dmd 4y agoYou say "I disagree with the niche market thing" but then as a counterexample give four niche markets.
- thangalin 4y ago#2 Radio communications, mountain-top repeaters. Not dropping $4k on chopper rides to battery swap would be a boon for the environment and bank accounts.
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- nanomonkey 4y agoPowering cargo planes seems like a niche market that would be suitable. The planes could have just enough power to get up above the cloud layer, then receive a charge boost each time they go below each solar powered satellite. This makes the planes lighter as they no longer need to carry as much fuel or batteries. A second consideration is that these satellites can be factories in space. Raw materials are much easier to launch into space using rail guns as the materials can survive higher g forces then humans or pre-manufactured goods. Once in space, the raw materials can be made into higher quality goods due to the lack of atmosphere and gravity. Once they are in space they can be put to use making further satellites, orbital rings or habitats.
- bastawhiz 4y agoCall me old fashioned, but the thought of putting a massive, heavy tube into the air full of cargo without enough energy to get it to its destination seems like an idea that will get a lot of people killed. I can't even get reliable satellite TV, I don't want "keep a plane of Amazon packages from landing in my attic" reception to be a thing I need to think about.
- krasin 4y agoThe primary use case here is trans-pacific. Not a lot of attics out there.
- akira2501 4y ago"Yea.. if it crashes, it just crashes into the ocean. What would the problem with that be?" Move fast and break things as applied to air transport really makes for some exciting opportunities, doesn't it?
- krasin 4y agoWe can either be infinitely scared and do nothing or we can actually make progress in a responsible manner and get a chance to fix climate.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoAlso, the first accident (there is always one) redirecting the beam to a populated area is going to be so spectacular I doubt it would recover after it.
- ben_w 4y agoAccidents probably won't be an issue (useful power density is surprisingly safe, and safeguards can be put in); malicious redirection of multiple beams, that probably is a threat. Multiple beams can only be guaranteed safe against malicious agents by making sure only one is in any given person's sky at any given moment, which either limits us to 6 worldwide or requires the satellites to be low enough that they're in earth's shadow. (Last time I said this on HN, I got an angry response from someone who clearly didn't understand what I was saying; I don't know if that is because words are bad at painting pictures or not, but regardless I really ought to get around to blogging this with pictures to show what I mean).
- noogle 4y ago> It's comparable to notions that fossil-fueled global warming could be fixed by parking a giant sunshade out at Lagrange 1. Why can't it work? Critics of this idea often cite cost or unintended consequences, but not ineffectiveness at mitigating the temperature rise (ocean acidification etc. are a different issue).
- Maursault 4y agoMy criticism is a massive L1 sunshade does absolutely nothing to solve the underlying problem, merely mitigates one of its effects while suppressing photosynthesis, reducing that aspect of the planet's ability to attack the underlying problem. There is only one solution to the problem which is to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere and accept the consequences for our lifestyles. The Earth will take care of the rest.
- dsign 4y ago> It's just far more efficient to build solar PV arrays on the ground, and to keep power on 24/7, build enough to store the energy for later use at night and in the winter. Throwing all that mass into orbit, even if in low-Earth orbit where decay and burnup in the atmosphere is guaranteed over time for the debris issue, is just a massive waste of resources, plus the energy loss over 100 km or so would undoubtedly very high. That argument makes perfect economic sense ... now. The same way that burning fuel still makes economic sense in quite a few cases. But environment anxiety is not only about burning fossil fuels, it is about deforestation, farting cows, the use of land for human activities, and well, basically every industrial economic activity. There is environmental anxiety about solar and about wind energy production, and about nuclear power. And it is often an-out-of-the-blue spurt for something that happens in another continent[^1]. We are slowly but surely channeling that anxiety by taxing "Earth use". Here is a thought experiment: try to imagine a world where human environmental footprint is bound in a way that satisfies even the most extreme environmentalists today, who--as anxiety raises--are going to be your average bread-and-butter (self-)conscious citizen of tomorrow. How does it look? How many of us? I wish we come upon a time when we decide to have space-based solar power and space-based living. The alternative is disquieting. [^1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cjyykdwmw58t https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cjyykdwmw58t
- Schroedingersat 4y agoEmigration and performing energy intensive work where the heat can just radiate away makes sense, but a world in which we pump 100s of Terawatts through the atmosphere as microwaves because we are dissatisfied with the 100s of terawatts falling on areas we have already paved is not one driven by environmentalism, but by avarice.
- pencilguin 4y agoThere is some truth in that. But of course we can collect solar and wind power on crop- and pastureland while still using it for those things. I doubt we will be returning much of either to nature, even though about 1/3 of the US maize crop now goes into vehicle fuel, which demand ought to start to fall off eventually. In principle that land could be returned to nature, but I doubt it will be.
- Nomentatus 4y agoBut those solar arrays on the ground are a target for light reflected from space at night, too. Throwing that into the space industry picture helps the costs.