The Energy of the Future

I knew that solar energy is the most efficient source of energy (since it's powered by fusion, after all), but I wanted to know more after I talked a few days ago with a friend who believes that nuclear power and super batteries are the way of the future. I wish we had way more nuclear plants - they're super cheap (in energy production costs) and super green. But we don’t. And I’m sure batteries will become better over time, but batteries do not generate energy.

Anyway, I found the following from the US Department of Defense's 2007 study called "Space-Based Power as an Opportunity for Strategic Security" -

"The magnitude of the looming energy and environmental problems is significant enough to warrant consideration of all options, to include revisiting a concept called Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) first invented in the United States almost 40 years ago. The basic idea is very straightforward: place very large solar arrays into continuously and intensely sunlit Earth orbit (1,366 watts/m2) , collect gigawatts of electrical energy, electromagnetically beam it to Earth, and receive it on the surface for use either as baseload power via direct connection to the existing electrical grid, conversion into manufactured synthetic hydrocarbon fuels, or as low‐intensity broadcast power beamed directly to consumers. A single kilometer‐wide band of geosynchronous earth orbit experiences enough solar flux in one year to nearly equal the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today. This amount of energy indicates that there is enormous potential for energy security, economic development, improved environmental stewardship, advancement of general space faring, and overall national security for those nations who construct and possess a SBSP capability."

I knew that orbiting solar panels would have vastly more efficient energy-gathering power, but I didn't know it was this much! Read the section I put in bold again. I don't know exactly how much energy is estimated to be contained in all known recoverable conventional oil reserves, but it's certainly more than a decade’s worth of world energy consumption (and it’s probably well more than two or three times that – 20 to 30 years). So, this sentence in bold, if accurate, is saying that a panel (or set of panels) just one kilometer wide in space would produce at least ten times more power in a year than the entire world consumes in a year!
Solar energy, gathered from orbit really is better than any alternative.

We already have the technology to launch and maintain satellites in space. We already have photovoltaic cells (solar energy gathering technology). The only thing we cannot yet do is beam energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. I have no idea how long that might take to have.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that we can beam energy to earth, but we cannot put in orbit panels effective enough to capture all of the energy that the sun is outputting. Let’s say that our kilometer wide panel can only capture a mere one percent of the sun’s energy beaming onto it. That would mean that it is capturing at least ten percent of the world’s energy consumption for one year (since the sun’s output per year is equal to at least ten years of world energy consumption). So far so good. Since the US consumes about a quarter of the world’s energy (last time I checked), then this kilometer wide panel (or set of panels) in orbit could produce each year more than one third of the energy consumed by the entire United States! The impact would be staggering – and remember, this would be for a solar panel that is only gathering one percent of the sun’s output, which I would imagine is a very inefficient, poorly designed solar panel.

However…there is an economic barrier to this project since satellites cost billions of dollars (and this was my friend’s principal argument against orbiting solar panels). But a cost-benefit analysis is obviously in favor of doing this! The entire world's energy supply being met and exceeded by only a few dozen satellites could only outweigh any conceivable cost.

To put it simply, the enterprise which can put up the first orbiting solar panel could be the world's first trillionaire! Hydrocarbons (and nuclear power plants) would become obsolete (at least as soon as we can manufacture every machine to be electrical) and we would never want for energy - and eventually, no nation on earth would want for energy, as soon as the infrastructure to procure the transmissions from space are in place in a given nation.

It sounds too good to be true, but then again, so was nuclear energy. However, orbiting solar panels won't have the whole radiation/meltdown thing, or the nuclear bomb baggage. So once orbiting solar panels begin, they probably won't ever decline like nuclear power did.

The study also says:
"NASA and DOE have collectively spent $80M over the last three decades in sporadic efforts studying this concept (by comparison, the U.S. Government has spent approximately $21B over the last 50 years continuously pursuing nuclear fusion)."

Cold fusion would grant unimaginable levels of energy - like one fusion plant could power the entire world's energy needs for centuries. But the technology is way more complicated than nuclear fission plants; plus it is apparently impossible to achieve (according to most physicists since the 90’s).

So what are we talking about here?

While both cold fusion and orbiting solar panels would eradicate all of our current energy problems while simultaneously destroying the global warming problem, only the orbiting solar panels are economically realistic and technologically feasible. And despite this, for every dollar spent by the US govt. on orbiting solar panels, $262.50 have been spent on a pipe dream that has no real chance of going anywhere. (Here’s the math - 21 billion is equal to 21,000 million – so we’re essentially comparing, in dollar terms, a ratio of 2100 to 8 or 262.5 to 1).

As soon as the US government starts to actually fund this effort, like it funded the nuclear power stuff in the 30's and 40's, there might be a revolution in energy! I hope so.