Flexible Solar Fabrics: 1 Euro/Watt

wrote:
This article was interesting:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6802

As usual, there seems to be some tradeoff in efficiency, but you
people
all tell me it always comes down to price per watt. The quoted 1
Euro/Watt seems pretty attractive.

1 Euro/watt is cheaper than nuclear, though utilisation will be much
lower.

However, what's interesting is the thickness, at 1 micrometre. Assuming
a substrate of thin aluminium foil, 1km2 would weigh about 20 tons,
and, assuming near term efficiency improvements, generate 100MW.

So how much would an Earth launched Satellite Solar Power Station cost?
Assuming ancillary structures, a 1GW station might weigh about 500
tons. How much would this cost to launch? Best current rates are about
$3,000-$5,000 per kilo to LEO, higher to GEO. So the station would cost
$1.5 billion to launch to LEO, and the material would cost $1 billion.

To raise the structure to GEO would cost more, but perhaps not too much
with large ion engines tugs raising 10 MW sections. Against that, at
this scale costs would rapidly come down, especially for launching. So
an efficient private sector operator could make SSP at perhaps $2.5
billion per GW.

This is almost competitive. If we move further, and demand exists for
say a TW of capacity, then launch costs would plummet, as would the
film production costs. At the 5,000 ton per year level (10 GW per
year), I'd expect launch costs to be well under $1,000 per kilo, even
without any lauch technology breakthrougs.

I always assumed that SSP was only viable with lunar / asteroid
resources, but this material prompts me to think again. Of course -
still a lot of issues to resolve, such as:
- Degradation
- Orbital deployment of km wide cells
- Low weight microwave generators
- Space cabling / station stucture
- Manned maintenance requirements in GEO
- etc