Solar power from space? it might happen in a couple of years

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/solar-power-from-space-actually-it-might-happen-in-a-couple-of-years/

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

16 58 2 years ago

Plenty of reasons to want this to work. Ground-based solar has so many flaws - ecological, legal, social, even efficiency is poor. And we aren't making any more open ground near cities to put square miles of solar farms.

Space-based is becoming more attractive every year. Lift costs, panel weight and cost, computing power are all going in the right direction to improve the space-solar economic equation. As for space, a few square miles is trivial to find a place for.

Further, the usual bugaboos about "How do you get it down here?!" (microwaves to high-capacity receivers) can be circumvented entirely if you use the power in space e.g. in AI-training compute centers also in orbit.

akira2501• 2 years ago

even efficiency is poor.

Not really. The atmosphere does reduce solar energy at the surface, but the fact we're 1 AU from the sun is the major reason we receive so little power.

The costs of putting things into orbit and maintaining things in orbit are unlikely to ever overcome the atmospheric difference.

Plus, on the surface of the Earth, you get convective cooling in atmosphere "for free." Good luck keeping your panels cool on orbit.

bloedsinnig4• 2 years ago

Ground based solar has very little flaws.

Its cheap (its just silicium plates), we will have organic based systems in the future. You will be able to print it in the future.

Efficency is huge. We have so much unused roof space, its ridicoulous. parking spots, house roofs, commercial building roofs.

Why would you think its smart to send computers, which need cooling, up to use the energy over there? Do you know how hard it is to radiate heat away in space?

scotty79• 2 years ago

commercial building roofs.

And southern walls.

euroderf5• 2 years ago

Space-based will by necessity be centralised. Some businesspeople like that kind of thing.

JoeAltmaier3• 2 years ago

All the usual 'obvious' points; all wrong.

Rooftop solar is pointless. Roofs don't scale; roofs are not optimally placed; roofs are hard to reach; roofs are not engineered to support the load or hardware. Open cheap unobstructed ground near a grid with clear access are optimal. Roofs are exactly zero of those.

Efficincy is 50% at best - the daily occurrence of the terrestrial eclipse known as 'night'? Remember?

Any panel argument is the same in space. Don't know what that point was about.

Using energy near the generation point is optimal. The heat argument is good; it goes double for a planet that's already heating up and causing problems. Get that shit away from our ecosystems.

Any advantage of ground-based solar is eroding daily with advances in lift cost, land price rises, congestion in cities. It's only a matter of time and money.

dekhn• 2 years ago

We don't need open ground near cities to put square miles of solar farms. Why would you do that? We have long-distance transmission lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie is 3GW from The Dalles Oregon to Los Angeles (as well as other parts of the west).

Putting AI training in space is daft. Heat dissipation is the problem (on top of gravity)

mbreese2• 2 years ago

can be circumvented entirely if you use the power in space e.g. in AI-training compute centers also in orbit.

In addition to power requirements and data transfer, I always thought that the main logistical issue with in-orbit computers was heat dissipation. If you have a need for compute in orbit (let’s assume this is true), you’d still need a way to dissipate heat. But this isn’t something that can happen easily in space.

(But it makes me wonder if you could have a Peltier generator attached to a hot chip to remove heat and “recycle” some of that energy back into electricity… not that it would help too much with the other issue with compute in orbit - data transfer)

schmidtleonard2• 2 years ago

Peltier gives you energy in exchange for making heat transfer worse. Or you can make heat transfer better by paying a bit of energy. The exchange rate is very poor in both directions.

brianbreslin2• 2 years ago

forgive my ignorance on this q. I always assumed based on movies that the temperatures in space were very cold (like near absolute zero). So wouldn't putting a hot data center in space just dissipate heat? Do shuttles and space stations not radiate heat?

JoeAltmaier3• 2 years ago

...and today somebody posts a WSJ article on exactly this subject.

bloedsinnig4• 2 years ago

Thats just not realistic at all. Its so far away from realistic, i'm not sure why arstechnica is posting this VC ad.

You need the size of the area you want to shine it up which is HUGE.

Why do we entertain this? How do people get funding for doing this? Are people so ignorant?

cooper_ganglia• 2 years ago

10 years ago, having a reusable rocket booster was not realistic.

5 years ago, catching a rocket booster with a tower was not realistic.

The past 150 years has been wild, I'm not too sure I think anything is unrealistic anymore.

bloedsinnig4• 2 years ago

How about we plaster our existing area full of PV and than in 10 years we talk about space?

jandrese2• 2 years ago

it might happen in a couple of years

Narrator: It will not happen.

The only place space based solar makes sense is on things that are in space.

mechagodzilla• 2 years ago

I think there probably is an actual niche for space-based solar, depending on how retarget-able it is. Imagine being able to beam 24/7 power to remote mining or military installations, or if you could really steer it, beaming it the receiving station with the highest power prices. If it's competing with diesel that needs to be flown in (or trucked through hazardous terrain), it would be much easier for it to be competitive.

czbond• 2 years ago

Good counter points, thanks for sharing those.

idontwantthis• 2 years ago

So you would build a solar array in space at enormous cost and then need to truck or fly in a receiver, and build it. Versus trucking and building a solar plant with batteries on site. I still don’t think that it’s ever going to make sense.

exe34• 2 years ago

would be a pretty cool weapon, you could melt the Kremlin and blow up every missile that make it past launch.

ortusdux• 2 years ago

Agreed. It would be a great option for ground stations on the moon. Lunar nights are 14 days long.

Ajedi324• 2 years ago

The article is extremely light on details, and I'm highly skeptical of the economics, though I do think its cool that they seem to be actively planning a demonstration mission. If nothing else, it would be neat to see the concept demonstrated in a real spacecraft.

I listened to a podcast[1] a few months ago which proposed the (IMHO) more innovative idea of using giant, ultra-light foil mirrors in space to sell sunlight to existing solar farms at night. Aetherflux seems to be using the more traditional solar panels + IR laser approach, which seems harder to justify the cost of compared to batteries.

[1] https://firstprinciples.fm/episodes/8-ben-nowack-selling-sun...

sapphicsnail• 2 years ago

I listened to a podcast[1] a few months ago which proposed the (IMHO) more innovative idea of using giant, ultra-light foil mirrors in space to sell sunlight to existing solar farms at night.

What would that look like from Earth? I can't imagine star-gazing with a giant mirror shining down on me.

Ajedi324• 2 years ago

I think the idea is it would look a bit like daylight, but only if you're in the area being lit (e.g. standing next to the solar farm), otherwise you wouldn't see it at all. But in practice, I'm not sure. I could imagine light leakage being an issue.

ctoth• 2 years ago

You write large orbital mirror for redirecting sunlight to solar farms I read space-based magnifying glass to cook any spot on the ground. Without running the numbers I'm not sure my intuition holds, does it?

kspacewalk2• 2 years ago

Found a rather... skeptical take (I'd argue it's more of a takedown)[0]. A bit crazy how far off the math is from viability, for a company that someone actually invested money in. Impressive salesmanship though.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkjyeI0ykGM

Ajedi324• 2 years ago

Yeah that looks pretty bad. I'm trying to figure out if something got lost in translation or if Reflect Orbital is just running an outright scam. It's pretty clear a 10m X 10m square can't transmit 200W/sqm to a 3km area. So either those figures were for a different version of the product (like maybe an array of hundreds or thousands of these cubesats all working in concert?) or he's just flat out lying about some very important figures.

Kuinox• 2 years ago

I avoid "debunk" channel like theses. Lots of them "debunked" SpaceX at it's beginning.

dabbz• 2 years ago

haha light on details

d--b• 2 years ago

A mobile receiving station? Uh? That sounds really bad, right?

josh11b• 2 years ago

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/space-based-so...

cryptonector• 2 years ago

This had better not heat the atmosphere...

bryanlarsen4• 2 years ago

These satellites also shade the Earth.

feoren3• 2 years ago

In Geostationary orbit? Only for something like 3% of the time. The rest of the time they're off to the side. They'd mostly be catching light that would otherwise never hit Earth.

euroderf5• 2 years ago

That's not a bug, that's a feature.

jmyeet• 2 years ago

I'll keep saying this until I'm blue in the face: solar power is the future. It is the only form of power generation that directly genreates power rather than turning a turbine. As such it has no moving parts (apart from, maybe, an array that gets tilted to face the Sun for higher efficiency but that's optional) and has no emissions.

The cost of solar power has plummetted in the last 2 decades and nobody is quite sure where this will bottom out.

Now obviously sometimes it's night time and sometimes it's just cloudy. You have a number of options for this, in increasing level of engineering and technological difficulty:

1. Do nothing. Just take power when it is available. This works surprisingly well for a lot of our power usage. Power usage peaks in daylight hours so solar reduces your baseload requirements. Sometimes you can simply do things when the weather doesn't permit (eg data centers).

2. Store excess power in another form. This could be batteries but it could also be things like sequestering carbon from the air into a hydrocarbon form you can later burn for power. This is carbon neutral by definition. This method currently isn't economic. In some cases that doesn't matter (eg in cold climates where current batteries aren't particularly effective).

3. Power satellites that bean down power. A solar collector in space would produce ~7 times as much power as a terrestrial collector because there's no day/night or weather interruptions nor atmospheric loss. It is technically feasible to beam down power.

4. Build an orbital ring. Attach solar collectors to it. Run cables to the ground. Obviously this is more far future.

More [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBCbdThIJNE

euroderf5• 2 years ago

Won't your #2 be economic when photovoltaic power is basically free ? The day is coming.

mprev• 2 years ago

Did we learn nothing from Sim City?

brianbreslin2• 2 years ago

Surprised no one has mentioned the classic Sim City 2000 microwave power plants that tended to erupt into flames. [1]

[1] https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_Power_Plant

godelski3• 2 years ago

Don't hold your breath on this one. I expect it to take a lot longer, but not for technical reasons. The truth is that however you do this you are developing weapons. At best, your allies will be on your side but your enemies will play this up, discussing how versions of whatever you do can be used against them. And even if exaggerated (and boy will it be), there will be grains of truth. These are the hardest lies to fight because they're half lies.

The problem always lies in how you get that energy down to Earth. There's no way to do this that can't also be used in a way that can be destructive. Even this proposal at 1kW you can do some damage. They're doing IR because this is fairly transmissible through the atmosphere but it can still be damaging. These range from a directed energy weapon (likely aimed at electronics) to a more denial of service attack (you'd need higher energy than 1kW). There's another proposal about just redirecting light[0] and I think it is easier to imagine how this is a weapon. Could you imagine someone just making you, in your house (or worse, it follows you around), always live in daylight? It would drive you crazy. I know the Nords, Alaskans, Canadians, and others will tell you there's challenges to living in perpetual daylight. But you can destabilize crops, which need night, insects and wildlife, and I'll let your imagination run wild. But this is also true for IR light, you just won't see it with your eyes. That still affects many insects, snakes, fish, and other animals, not to mention plants. IR is heat, and it doesn't take much heat to disrupt things.

On a different point:

  > told me he wants to reinvent the idea of space-based solar power beginning with a relatively small investment—likely a bit north of $10 million
  > That physicist is Baiju Bhatt, who co-founded the electronic trading platform Robinhood in 2013

He's asking for $10m? Why? Can someone help me with this? Forbes has him at $1.7bn net worth[1]. $10m is nothing to this guy, right? Even if he doesn't have that cash liquid it should be very easy for him to get a very low interest rate loan where the maturity is upon death that will give him access to this level of money. So why does he need the investment? What am I missing?

[0] https://x.com/colecallinan/status/1826683972207661499

[1] https://www.forbes.com/profile/baiju-bhatt/

bryanlarsen4• 2 years ago

200 w/sqm is not a weapon. It's barely enough to keep you warm in the winter time.

godelski3• 2 years ago

You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean you understood my point.

It seems you aren't aware that space is not controlled by a single country. It's ruled by international agreements. Do you really think everyone sitting at that table is going to be using that power to make laws based purely on the merit of the technology and it's safety? Or do you think they're going to be bullshit arguments that are reaching at best? We both know the answer to that. Predicting what they will argue is not the same thing as saying their points will be valid. But you also can't just pretend that bullshit won't exist.

johnea• 2 years ago

Doesn't ALL solar power come from space?

highflux7• 2 years ago

https://spectrum.ieee.org/space-based-solar-power-2667878868

Solar power from space? it might happen in a couple of years

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