Orbital solar power plants touted for energy needs

J. Clarke wrote:
It happens for a period ranging from about 6 minutes to about 70 minutes
90 days out of the year, it doesn't happen every night. And there are a
variety of ways of handling it that don't involve power storage.

Jorge R. Frank wrote:
GEO eclipses don't occur every night due to the obliquity of the
ecliptic. The GEO sats are on the equatorial plane but the earth's umbra
and penumbra lie along the ecliptic plane. During northern hemisphere
summer and winter the GEO sats pass above and below the shadow,
respectively. GEO eclipses are only possible when the satellites are
within about 8.7 deg of the ecliptic, which occurs around the equinoxes.
Even then, the max duration eclipse only occurs *at* the equinox.

Yeah that 23.5 degree tilt. I stand corrected. Should have done a simple
Google search before posting. It lasts for a few days around each equinox
(spring/vernal and fall/autumnal).

As for a "variety of ways of handling it that don't involve power storage", I
guess a few oil, natural gas or coal fired power plants will do. (That's a joke)

Dave

PS: IMHO, its just too expensive. Again take a look at the history of
Teledesic vs the cell phone companies offering WiMax. With SSP I think you're
looking at a similar set of economics. UNLESS the government were to pump
billions (and billions as Carl used to say) of coerced tax dollars into it
over a decade or three, then possibly, like the taxpayer supported interstate
highway system supplanting most of the privately financed railroads, yeah,
maybe the government owned satellite power monopoly could drive all the
privately owned power [generating] utilities out of business. However, barring
massive government intervention, today, right now, as it stands, the
infrastructure cost is just too high.

PPS: The military (esp. Army and Marine Corps.) could definitely take
advantage of SSP on a much smaller scale. And although probably too expensive
to supply base-line to the underdeveloped world, NGOs might also be granted
the ability to utilize the smaller military powersats to provide short-term
disaster relief in areas reachable by the beams that have an emergency need.

PPPS: To be able to develop this for the military and NGOs you'll have a
political fight on your hands with the 'death-ray' true-believers, no matter what.

Jorge R. Frank wrote:
Even then, the max duration eclipse only occurs *at* the equinox.

Having once been a sufferer with satellite-based internet service, it also
begs the question of solar interference during the daytime.

I know it causes short intervals of interference for satcoms, but with the
more diffuse powersat beams would solar interference be an issue?

Dave

Jorge R. Frank wrote:
GEO eclipses don't occur every night due to the obliquity of the
ecliptic.

Jorge is too kind to say it, so I'll put on my Fred hat and do so:

"Spain has published two amazingly stupid articles within a span of less than
a week. This guy needs to take a refresher course in intelligence."

There! When it comes to flaming someone, I think I should make myself fair
game. Besides why should I deny myself the fun?

;-)

Dave

In article , says...

J. Clarke wrote:
It happens for a period ranging from about 6 minutes to about 70 minutes
90 days out of the year, it doesn't happen every night. And there are a
variety of ways of handling it that don't involve power storage.

Jorge R. Frank wrote:
GEO eclipses don't occur every night due to the obliquity of the
ecliptic. The GEO sats are on the equatorial plane but the earth's umbra
and penumbra lie along the ecliptic plane. During northern hemisphere
summer and winter the GEO sats pass above and below the shadow,
respectively. GEO eclipses are only possible when the satellites are
within about 8.7 deg of the ecliptic, which occurs around the equinoxes.
Even then, the max duration eclipse only occurs *at* the equinox.

Yeah that 23.5 degree tilt. I stand corrected. Should have done a simple
Google search before posting. It lasts for a few days around each equinox
(spring/vernal and fall/autumnal).

As for a "variety of ways of handling it that don't involve power storage", I
guess a few oil, natural gas or coal fired power plants will do. (That's a joke)

Dave

PS: IMHO, its just too expensive. Again take a look at the history of
Teledesic vs the cell phone companies offering WiMax. With SSP I think you're
looking at a similar set of economics. UNLESS the government were to pump
billions (and billions as Carl used to say) of coerced tax dollars into it
over a decade or three, then possibly, like the taxpayer supported interstate
highway system supplanting most of the privately financed railroads, yeah,
maybe the government owned satellite power monopoly could drive all the
privately owned power [generating] utilities out of business. However, barring
massive government intervention, today, right now, as it stands, the
infrastructure cost is just too high.

PPS: The military (esp. Army and Marine Corps.) could definitely take
advantage of SSP on a much smaller scale. And although probably too expensive
to supply base-line to the underdeveloped world, NGOs might also be granted
the ability to utilize the smaller military powersats to provide short-term
disaster relief in areas reachable by the beams that have an emergency need.

PPPS: To be able to develop this for the military and NGOs you'll have a
political fight on your hands with the 'death-ray' true-believers, no matter what.

You're assuming that launch costs remain ludicrous.

A Saturn V at today's prices used about 4 million bucks worth of
propellant. The Russians charge about 70 million to put up a Soyuz,
which has about 1/10 the payload.

And there in a nutshell is the problem.

On Nov 19, 3:17*am, William Mook wrote:
On Nov 18, 11:11*pm, Fred J. McCall wrote:

Doug Freyburger wrote:

Space based power can supplement base load. *Ground based solar can't.

On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:18:00 -0500, David Spain
wrote:

Jorge is too kind to say it, so I'll put on my Fred hat and do so:

"Spain has published two amazingly stupid articles within a span of less than
a week. This guy needs to take a refresher course in intelligence."

There! When it comes to flaming someone, I think I should make myself fair
game. Besides why should I deny myself the fun?

Jorge is a better man than either of us. Clarke is a half-wit and I'm
not afraid to say so.

Brian

On Nov 19, 8:46*am, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:
On Nov 18, 11:11*pm, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote:

Space based power can supplement base load. *Ground based solar can't.

Why not?

It requires global interconnection and/or intermediate storage.

And we already do that with ground based solar,

Not on a large scale. The cost of lead acid batteries for example
exacts a tremendous cost.


Primary Batteries

AAA Cell AA Cel C Cell D Cell

1.5V 1.5V 1.5V 1.5V 9 Volt

Capacity 1.1 Ah 2.5 Ah 7.1 Ah 14.3 Ah 7Ah
Alkaline Alkaline Alkaline Alkaline Alkaline

Energy 1.4 Wh 3Wh 9Wh 18 Wh 4.2 Wh

Battery Cost $1.25 $1.00 $1.60 $1.60 $3.10

$/kWh $890 $330 $180 $90 $730


Rechargeable batteries




NiCdAA NiMHAA Lead Acid Li-ion

Energy per discharge 4.5Wh 7.5Wh 24Wh 8.6Wh

Cycle life (best cases) 1500 500 250 500

Cost per battery $50 $70 $50 $100

Cost per kWh $7.50 $18.50 $8.50 $24.00


Now lets look at solar panel costs (from Solarserver.com)

€ / Wp

Crystalline Germany 1.29

Crystalline China 0.92

Crystalline Japan 1.22

Thin film CdS/CdTe 0.84

Thin film a-Si 0.74

Thin film a-Si/µ-Si 0.89

Say its $1 per peak watt. That means if located in region that
receives 3 hours per day, 8 watts willl charge a 24 Watt hour lead
acid battery. That battery will produce power on demand at an
average rate of 1 Watt.

These are factory costs, and do not include installation.

A homebuilt system that produces 1,000 Watts average power
needs;

45 panels at 180W and $490 = $22,050
1,000 Lead Acid batteries at $50 = $50,000
8 intertie at 3,000 W at $2,900 = $23,200

TOTAL: $95,250

The batteries will last 1 year and need to be replaced annually.

Not only do battery costs dominate, they will also produce far more
pollution than burning coal, oil or natural gas.

If these primary fuels become scarce, the cost of lead and everything
else, will skyrocket - and costs will be even higher.

Sodium Sulfur batteries have been used on a utility scale in Japan. I
have been associated with AEPs effort to experiment with this in
Whitehall Ohio several years ago. These may last 8 to 9 years. These
also may cost half as much as lead acid batteries. So, the annual
cost is reduced to $6,000 per year with a 30 year life on the intertie
and panel and an 8 year life on the battery.

These batteries do not yet exist for general sale.

In practice most intertie systems are set up to feed power back to the
grid. Most localities require their utilities to accept this power at
market rates. Provided peak power


which brings me back
to my question of 'why not'?

Because they're not economic.

Mookjacking of thread elided

You elided how to make it economic. I producie an 8 foot x 4 foot
panel at a cost of $82.50 This panel produces hydrogen at a rate of
41.5 grams per hour of sunlight it receives from 373.5 ml of water per
hour which is fed to it.

Exposing that panel to the same 3 hours of sunlight per day produces
124.5 grams per day of hydrogen from 1.12 liters of water per day.

An petrol fired 8 kW generator modified to burn hydrogen and air
supplied with 2.2 kg per day of hydrogen produces the same 24 kWh per
day of electricity as the previous system.

53 panels x $82.50 = $4,372.50
8 kW generator = $3,900.00

An automotive high pressure hydrogen tank is being developed for
automotive use

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea...-76142332.html

capable of storing 22 kg of hydrogen gas. The cost of this is
expected to be $500 in quantity. This is sufficient to run a home
generator like that described above, for 10 days. Supplying 4 tanks
gives a 40 day storage capacity.

4 tanks 22 kg each = $2,000

So, the total system is $10,272.50 and the panels cover a region 32 ft
x 52 ft.

The engine must be serviced every 3 months and the entire system
replaced every 18 years.

I've designed a plant capable of producing 14,000 panels per hour

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22490014/Sugico-Mok-Plan-3

to support the hydrogen supply needs of a growing number of coal
hydrogenation facilities. Taking 1% of this total and converting it
to systems of the type described above, produce 10 units per hour,
87,660 units per year since the facility runs 24/7

Homes that use energy at a rate of 24 kWh per day and pay $0.12 per
kWh would provide a modest profit with a $2,000 installation fee paid
up front.

Such systems would take homes entirely off the grid.

The way to go with this technology is to do a 200,000 b/d coal
conversion facility using it. This facility requires the conversion
of 29,400 metric tons of coal each day using 3,000 metric tons of
hydrogen each day. This requires 24,000,000 million panels be
installed covering 7,200 hectares, which is completed in 3 months.
Over the same period 22,000 home units are built and distributed.

At $100 per barrel, the oil revenue is worth $7.3 billion per year and
has a present value of $100 billion. Well worth the investment of
$2.0 billion for the panels and $3.7 billion for coal conversion.

22,000 homes represent an asset worth $0.3 billion and cost $0.2
billion. 100x this figure is $10 billion in wealth creation.

Building Coal Conversion Systems: $100 billion
Building Home Power Systems; $ 10 billion
Cost of Factory: $1.5 billion








--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
*man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
*all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * --George Bernard Shaw

On Nov 21, 5:16*am, David Spain wrote:
J. Clarke wrote:
Two major benefits of orbital solar are that it doesn't have to deal
with the day/night cycle and it can put the power where it's needed--NYC
needs a lot more power than does Flagstaff, Arizona, but has a lot less
convenient desert.

Just to be clear about this, even for orbital solar power, output is not
continuous 24/7. For powersats orbiting at GEO there is a short period of time
(about 1 hr) at geographical midnight (for the ground based zenith) where the
powersat passes into the Earth's shadow. For a photo-electric based powersat
the output drops to zero, for a thermal-electric powersat it would drop in
proportion to the thermal "inertia" of the powersat, until it emerges from the
Earth's shadow a little under an hour later.

This cycle repeats nightly. Although 1 hour is indeed a lot less than the
*typical* day/night cycle on Earth's surface (depending upon season and latitude).

Dave

That's true only for 1 day a year since the equatorial plane is
inclined to the plane of the ecliptic.

A world circled with 8,710 power plants that beam energy on demand to
mobile as well as stationary customers, this is not really an issue.

On Nov 21, 10:35*pm, Brad Guth wrote:
On Nov 19, 3:17*am, William Mook wrote:









On Nov 18, 11:11*pm, Fred J. McCall wrote:

Doug Freyburger wrote:

Space based power can supplement base load. *Ground based solar can't.

Why not?

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
*territory."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * --G. Behn

It requires global interconnection and/or intermediate storage. *My
solar panels produce hydrogen and oxygen from water. *The hydrogen is
gathered and stored in depleted gas wells for up to 90 days. *The
hydrogen is withdrawn as needed and transmitted to stationary power
plants where it replaced carbon fuels. *Additional hydrogen is used to
convert carbon fuel to liquid transportation fuels. *Those fuels are
replaced with hydrogen as mobile systems are converted to hydrogen
use.

Stored solar energy can also be in the form of hot water, or simply in
products made and/or processed from the clean energy. *Peak energy via
industrial sized fuel cells that can reach 50% efficiency, plus their
waste heat recovery should put this method up close to to 60%.

Each and every community on Earth needs hot water for all sorts of
reasons.

Each and every community needs its utility electrical energy at
something less then 5 cents per kwhr. (especially needed with those
all-electric cars that'll need to consume an average of 50 kwhrs/day
because all electric car manufactures basically lie when they claim
such good performance with a new battery pack, usually no hills, no
great number of stop and goes, no HVAC or nighttime driving and they
do not mention the recharge conversion efficiency or the waste heat
from such).

Your terrestrial solar farms should have been established and at full
capacity as of nearly a decade ago, and thereby providing cheaper
energy for us, a cleaner environment plus exporting of energy related
products and those Mokenergy synfuels as a done deal.

Instead, the best system of advancing technology we got kinda sucks.
DoE must stand for the Department of Exclusion, or perhaps Department
of Extreme-Obfuscation.

*http://translate.google.com/#
*Brad Guth, Brad_Guth, Brad.Guth, BradGuth, BG / “Guth Usenet”

Its hard to light a bulb or run a computer with hot water.

On Nov 21, 7:02*pm, "J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...











J. Clarke wrote:
It happens for a period ranging from about 6 minutes to about 70 minutes
90 days out of the year, it doesn't happen every night. *And there are a
variety of ways of handling it that don't involve power storage.

Jorge R. Frank wrote:
GEO eclipses don't occur every night due to the obliquity of the
ecliptic. The GEO sats are on the equatorial plane but the earth's umbra
and penumbra lie along the ecliptic plane. During northern hemisphere
summer and winter the GEO sats pass above and below the shadow,
respectively. GEO eclipses are only possible when the satellites are
within about 8.7 deg of the ecliptic, which occurs around the equinoxes.
Even then, the max duration eclipse only occurs *at* the equinox.

Yeah that 23.5 degree tilt. I stand corrected. Should have done a simple
Google search before posting. It lasts for a few days around each equinox
(spring/vernal and fall/autumnal).

As for a "variety of ways of handling it that don't involve power storage", I
guess a few oil, natural gas or coal fired power plants will do. (That's a joke)

Dave

PS: IMHO, its just too expensive. Again take a look at the history of
Teledesic vs the cell phone companies offering WiMax. With SSP I think you're
looking at a similar set of economics. UNLESS the government were to pump
billions (and billions as Carl used to say) of coerced tax dollars into it
over a decade or three, then possibly, like the taxpayer supported interstate
highway system supplanting most of the privately financed railroads, yeah,
maybe the government owned satellite power monopoly could drive all the
privately owned power [generating] utilities out of business. However, barring
massive government intervention, today, right now, as it stands, the
infrastructure cost is just too high.

PPS: The military (esp. Army and Marine Corps.) could definitely take
advantage of SSP on a much smaller scale. And although probably too expensive
to supply base-line to the underdeveloped world, NGOs might also be granted
the ability to utilize the smaller military powersats to provide short-term
disaster relief in areas reachable by the beams that have an emergency need.

PPPS: To be able to develop this for the military and NGOs you'll have a
political fight on your hands with the 'death-ray' true-believers, no matter what.

You're assuming that launch costs remain ludicrous.

A Saturn V at today's prices used about 4 million bucks worth of
propellant. *The Russians charge about 70 million to put up a Soyuz,
which has about 1/10 the payload.

And there in a nutshell is the problem.

I have designed a highly reusable launch system and a light weight
solar power system described here - to convert my terrestrial arrays
that produce hydrogen into laser boosted arrays.

The game plan is;

(1) Buy a coal company
(2) Cover spent surface mines with solar panels
(3) Make hydrogen
(4) Convert coal plants to hydrogen fired plants
(5) Sell hydrogen instead of coal
(6) Convert stranded coal to petrol
(7) Merge with undervalued oil retailer
(8) Buy Boeing
(9) Break up Boeing into four divisions
(10) Sell three of the four divisions
(11) Keep the money losing space division
(12) Build the launcher and powersat

Lightweight Laser Power Sat
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49764323/P...etail%E2%80%9D

Lightweight Laser Power Sat
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35439593/S...-Satellite-GEO

External Tank Derived Heavy Lift Launcher
http://www.scribd.com/doc/31261680/Etdhlrlv-Addendum

External Tank Derived Heavy Lift Launcher
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30943696/ETDHLRLV

External Tank Derived Heavy Lift Launcher
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30877060/E...Launch-Vehicle

Coal/Oil Merger
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33089455/sunoco-2

Coal to Oil Process
http://www.scribd.com/doc/37046560/M...Part-2-Draft01

Solar Hydrogen Process (type a)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21832226/M...ectral-Cooling