[ExI] Space based solar power

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 1:14 AM,  Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:

> Current US price for electricity is around 11 cents/kWh.
> Granted, that's including taxes et al - but it's not
> much better (and often worse) elsewhere, where that
> isn't included.
>
> If you could accept 10 cents/kWh - merely competitive
> with today's prices (and better than rising prices - an
> insulator against current trends, which may be enough
> for a 10 year payback), that's an additional $6400/kW,
> or almost $1300/kg given your numbers.  $1400/kg to GEO
> is still a bit of an improvement on today's numbers,
> but not quite as far as $100/kg.

Sigh.

To make any economic sense out of power satellites, you have to get
the cost of power down to where it takes a substantial part of the
market.  That means substantially less than coal.

Plus the really big energy market is in liquid fuels.  You can make
carbon neutral liquid fuels from air and water but it takes several
times as much power as the total electrical output of the US, about
two TW.

The problem is that the infrastructure to build power satellites is
expensive, $100 B or more.  That's not an unreasonable number in the
context of selling $320 B a year (200 GW) of new power, but at the
kind of sales you would get at ten cents a kWh, it's an insane number.

Keith