Posted on 04/11/2005 12:33:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Economics
Sam Dinkin: How is lunar solar power (LSP) different from Earth solar or orbital solar power generation?
David Criswell: The Moon has no atmosphere, rain, or clouds to block sunlight as does the Earth. Doing the construction on the Moon is far less expensive than sending raw or processed materials to deep space for later use. There are fewer manufacturing operations. You do not have to build the platform.
Dinkin: What is the minimum money scale for a viable lunar solar power (LSP) project that would cost the same as Earth generated power?
Criswell: When LSP approaches 100 gigawatts electricity (GWe) of capacity and has delivered in excess of 500 GWe years (GWe-y) of energy the LSP energy will drop below the cost of electric energy from conventional systems. This will likely require the order of $400 to $500 billion.
This is a bit over one year of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) budget or about three years of global expenditures on exploration and development of oil and natural gas to maintain about 85 million barrels of oil per day production. A 20-terawatt-electricity (TWe) LSP is the equivalent of 1,000 million barrels of oil per day.
Dinkin: Does that include lobbying, regulatory, legal, fundraising, and marketing? Insurance? What does it include?
Criswell: The estimates are for engineering and operations costs and some interest to bring the demo to commercial scale.
Dinkin: When will the price of electricity start to drop if you were given the money today?
Criswell: Approximately 15 years after the start of an Apollo-priority program the cost of electricity would drop beneath $0.10/kilowatt electricity hour (kWe-h). By 2040 the cost would be a fraction of a cent per kWe-h.
Dinkin: Why wouldn’t the owners of the solar power production charge the monopoly price, i.e., just a hair less than the cost of Earth’s electricity sources?
Criswell: Following the demonstration phase more than one organization can be licensed to construct and operate lunar power bases. They can compete to sell electric energy to any rectenna on Earth or in space. They will have strong incentives to compete in the rapid installation of capacity.
Dinkin: If they formed a cartel like OPEC, how much could they make?
Criswell: I attend the Houston Chapter meetings of the International Association of Energy Economists. Last Thursday Professor J. Smith of SMU gave an excellent talk on recent unpublished research on the Net Present Value (NPV) of OPEC versus the averaged selling price of oil through 2050. The NPV refers to the net profit, and not the capitalization, of OPEC that is required to extract their oil and natural gas over the next 20 or 50 years. He estimated [the NPV to be] a minimum of about $2.5 trillion and maximum of $3.3 trillion.
When the LSP system delivers 20 TWe and the energy is sold at $0.01/kWe-h then the profit is approximately $1.6 trillion/year. Thus, LSP would replicate all future OPEC NPV in two to three years.
Dinkin: That is fantastic. That is a huge source of clean power beckoning. Are you saddened by all of the deaths related to pollution and wars when we could have lunar solar today if we had stayed on the Moon with a 15-person research base in the 70s?
Criswell: Of course. The daily global lost of life due to the lack of low-cost energy is the order of the deaths from the Indonesian tsunami.
Dinkin: Suppose I want to invest. Who do I apply to in order to get a license to broadcast? Land to set up shop on the Moon?
Criswell: I believe that each nation is free to set its own uses of the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, mutual interference must be considered. Due to the extraordinarily high value of the narrow bandwidth necessary for space power, it can displace other uses, especially those that can migrate to fibers. However, there are harmonics to consider. So, this is a work in progress.
The “Outer Space Treaty” appears to set one international basis for the use of the Moon, on a non-interference basis, by parties to the treaty. That seems adequate for a start. Of course, the law will evolve.
Dinkin: Doesn’t the Outer Space Treaty prevent any ownership interest in the Moon? “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
Criswell: As I understand the treaty, a signatory nation or its designated organizations can occupy an area on the Moon, extract resources (physical and intangible) on a non-interference basis, and use them on the Moon or send them off the Moon. When the signatory nation or its designated organizations stop using the installations and territory then they can sell the installations but cannot sell the territory. They simply leave.
This understanding was from the NASA General Council that was provided to the Lunar Energy Enterprise Task Force in 1988.
Security
Dinkin: Are there any drawbacks to LSP? If we adopted LSP as you advocate, aren’t we putting energy security in one basket?
Criswell: What are the other options? As far as I can tell, the other options provide far less security and actually drive regional and global insecurity. Fossil power systems are certainly subject to local (Iraq) and global (CO2, ash, mercury, etc.) problems.
The sun is the ultimate necessary power source for a truly prosperous (large-scale) human society. The other power options do not, to me, appear adequate to provide 10 billion, or more people, with more than 2 kWe/person.
Thus, priority will be given to making the LSP System robust. Also, LSP is a distributed and highly redundant system. It would be very difficulty to wipe out large portions. Also, it is very hard to sneak to the Moon.
Dinkin: The Outer Space Treaty outlaws weapons on the Moon. “The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military maneuvers on celestial bodies shall be forbidden.” Isn’t this inconsistent with defending a resource valued in trillions of dollars?
Criswell: Installations on the Moon and in orbit to secure the LSP system would directly provide security to everyone on Earth. That type of defensive operation seems appropriate and prudent.
Dinkin: Here’s a scenario: a terrorist group hijacks the regular shuttle to the Moon. They kill the operators at the Moon base, then steal local mining equipment and use it to wreck the capital equipment. Does it matter that we can see what they are doing if there is no security apparatus to stop them?
Criswell: The LSP bases are spread over tens of thousands of square kilometers and composed of hundreds of thousands of individual stand-alone power plots. The control system will also be widely distributed. It would be somewhat like taking down the Internet.
Any rational program, government or private, would provide security for the planet’s most vital economic resource.
Dinkin: DoD is testing a microwave crowd control weapon. How can the broadcaster be prevented from being weaponized?
Criswell: The control system on the Moon can be slaved to individual receivers (rectennas farms) on Earth. The distributed control system can be designed (using hardware and software) to not allow concentration of the beams above approved levels on Earth. There can be many, many off switches.
Business and politics
Dinkin: If your project is as over budget as other space programs, how much will we need to spend to achieve parity with Earth sources?
Criswell: All projects have to start somewhere. Jim Webb, on his way to Congress to present the first detailed cost plan for Apollo, doubled the estimate from $12.5 billion to $25 billion. The LSP payoff is so enormous, very high leverage, that an aggressive approach is reasonable.
The United States did achieve the Moon, starting from scratch, within 10 years. The cost of LSP can increase by a factor of 10 and still deliver energy that is competitive with conventional Earth systems.
The $400–500 billion expenditure seems a reasonable estimate for achieving an industrial demonstration. The LSP system, the production systems, and the transportation between the Earth and the Moon will all steadily improve and drop in unit cost as energy production and industrial learning occur and are enabled by increasing profits.
We do need to make sure that the early phases of the LSP development focus like a laser on the goal: expeditious supply of adequate, clean, affordable, and sustainable electric power for Earth. Then expand to the creation of a wealth generating economy on the Moon, Earth orbit, and beyond.
Dinkin: Is there a way to do the research on a shoestring?
Criswell: The research that is critical to LSP is occurring worldwide in electronics, radio astronomy, automated manufacturing, and so on. The challenge is to use this growing bounty. LSP requires industrial engineering and not a prolonged research and development program. This basic knowledge and operating experience of related systems already exists and is growing daily in consumer and defense electronics, radio astronomy, automation of manufacturing, etc.
Dinkin: If the company operating the solar goes broke because it cannot make the debt payments, how much will it cost to operate the solar array without paying any capital costs?
Criswell: The operation and maintenance expenditures are very small per unit of delivered energy compared to installation. Continuing sales of energy would bring the LSP system back to profitability.
Dinkin: Will it take a government to do this investment because of its perceived risk?
Criswell: I think US government action is needed in the early phase. The needed actions are analogous to those required for the US Interstate Highway System. Even President Eisenhower could not have organized enough car dealers in 1958 to fund the Interstate. However, once the federal government committed it became possible for car dealers, even used car dealers and many other businesses and developers, to invest along side the new roads. This is similar to arguments for canals, railroads, etc.
Alternatives
Dinkin: Let’s explore some of the alternatives to LSP and how the transition would occur. What would happen to the price of oil, uranium, and coal if LSP undercut the current electricity prices?
Criswell: They likely all decrease in value. Their primary uses would likely change. For example, most petroleum and coal would likely go into the production of petrochemicals.
Dinkin: If it would be cheaper to burn uranium in a nuclear reactor, why wouldn’t we just do that for power generation?
Criswell: The energy content of available uranium/thorium for once-through (conventional) reactors is somewhat less than for the remaining oil and natural gas (about 400 terawatt thermal years (TWt-y) or about 110 TWe-y). A prosperous world will consume about 2,000 TWe-y each century. Thus, why invest in power systems that have a much more limited life time and return on investment?
The nuclear industry must convert to breeder reactions for much larger energy output. Every attempt to make affordable breeder reactors has failed. I think the four demonstration breeder reactors (US, Japan, Russia, France) are closed or closing. Breeder reactors also generate enormous quantities of weapons grade plutonium. A 20-TWe world would require the opening one and disposal of another “one-GWe” reactor unit every day (given the approximately 30 year lifetime) and 20,000 reactors total. The world now has only approximately 330 conventional reactors.
Dinkin: Why is LSP more credible than Earth nuclear fusion generation for $400–500 billion?
Criswell: All the components of the proposed LSP system exist and have operated for many years to decades. Stable contained fusion with a net energy output has yet to be demonstrated. The demonstration is not expected for several decades. Commercialization will take many more years.
Dinkin: You mention a 25-year ramp-up period starting in 15 years. In a similar transition, water wheels were no longer built when steam engines came online. But they continued to operate for 70 more years until they all wore out. So the number for you to beat to replace carbon electricity sources (and not just stop the production of new power plants) is the marginal cost of the fuel and operations rather than the fully loaded capital costs since all the capital costs are sunk, right?
Criswell: No. If the new technology can provide greater payoff and less risk, then the shift to the new technology can be swift and the move from the old technology can be equally swift. The production of new nuclear plants in the US stopped quickly after Three Mile Island. Conversely, the installation of new combined-cycle natural gas plants increased rapidly during the time of low-priced gas.
The number to beat is the need of the poor for adequate power, greater than 2 kWe/person, and the need of the world for sustainable clean power. My analyses indicate that no other technologically understandable option exists.
Spending the dividends
Dinkin: To aid the poor as you describe would require tremendous wealth transfer. Why will the first world owner do more than the US government is doing for foreign aid? That is, spend about 1% of its budget supporting third world growth rather than the 80-90% that you anticipate?
Criswell: LSP can operate like the Marshall Plan or other international government and corporate programs that invest in other nations to enable greater production, consumption, and wealth generation. This is far better than aid. Each rectenna becomes a power source for the local generation of sustainable net new wealth. The new wealth contributes to far larger global markets that help both the developed and developing world. The investments would be primarily in existing technologies that are known to work and provide high return.
Dinkin: The NASA budget is as big as the foreign aid budget at 1% of government spending. Why wouldn’t the first world use broadcast power for rich country pursuits like interplanetary and interstellar exploration?
Criswell: Energy absorbs about 10% to 15% of the US gross domestic product per person. LSP could significantly reduce that fraction and [thereby] accelerate the growth of American wealth. The LSP commercial infrastructure will vastly accelerate US ability to conduct missions beyond the Earth and the Moon. This is a far better option than using government discretionary income to fund space sciences versus social security and Medicare.
Dinkin: Could a microwave grid power a fast interplanetary flight?
Criswell: Yes. I believe that is how deep space transportation will be enabled.
Dinkin: What do you say to those who think we have failed as a species to have high enough moral character to leave the Earth and would spoil the solar system and the galaxy with our presence?
Criswell: The galaxy is large enough to accommodate the most generous of human moral achievements and failures. The universe will kill us if we don’t move outward from the galactic core. Of course, nowhere is completely safe. We must keep learning.
However, what I am talking about now is the establishment of commodities manufacturing on the Moon. Useful commodities are good. A small fraction of the human race is pretty good at commodities manufacturing. We need to first provide a few of the components to collect solar power on the Moon and then enable very long electromagnetic extension cords to Earth and elsewhere (ethereal power lines).
Dinkin: What compels you to devote your life to helping humanity become spacefaring?
Criswell: It has been a fulfilling intellectually intense activity. I’ve made my money in other space-related activities. Hopefully, LSP will be a profitable activity in a reasonable time.
Dinkin: Is it hard to be a visionary who knows a better way?
Criswell: Until LSP is successfully operating I will not know.
http://www.isso.uh.edu/
Okay, you and all the rest of you crazies can go put mirrors on the moon. In the meantime, I'll be perfecting the nuclear fusion reactor in my garage.
An investment in Lunar industry can produce cell after cell that will have a very long life in the optimal conditions for electronics on the Moon. By producing vast farms of solar cells, power can be gathered without any clouds or atmosphere to get in the way. If the solar photovoltaic power cells are built out of Lunar materials, a small industrial base on the Moon can lead to enough power to export by radar beam back to the Earth. Lunar solar power (LSP) is a low pollution, low operating cost, high capacity power generation technology...............*** Rectifying the case for beaming Lunar solar power
Some info at LINK in Post #3.
Exactly!!
They all seem to gloss over the fact that 100 gigawatts electricity delivered via any technology know would totally fry any and all life at the receiver locations.
Any one who has ever worked around powerful radar stations (Like the NORAD or DEW installations) knows there is the morning bird patrol, sent out to pick up the dead birds fried by the operations of the last 24 hours.
Yet all these reports talk about how easy it is to beam power. Well maybe in the lab, with a safe backdrop.
I don't see any of these folks lining up to have their house and children microwaved 23/7/365 by enough power to run even your household fan.
Some way of sending power around the moon itself would have to be constructed for new moon periods, as the half of the moon receiving sunlight would be facing away from the earth, where the transmiters would have to be located.
Also, some way of transmitting these huge amounts of power between continents on earth would have to be developed and constructed for the 12 hours per day when any particular point on the earth faces away from the moon.
Translation: It ain't ever going to happen!
Areas around the polls are in almost total sunlight.
If you don't like that plan. How about launching regolith (lunar dirt) into space and building solar arrays there? It would solve property dispute problems.
Why use the Moon when we could simply put SPS's in Earth orbit? The Moon would be a better place as a platform for interplanetary launches, manufacturing rocket fuel from hydrogen, or for observatories.
It's good for many things and we better get our buns their first.
Actually, due to various irregularities in lunar orbital movement, the polar areas nod in and out of sight of the earth, so building right at the polar areas would not be sufficient.
If this concept has any prospect of working, putting the collectors and transmitters in synchronous orbit makes a lot more sense.
The info in post three shows 10,000 watts being transmitted and 500 watts recovered, or 5% of what was sent. That's a serious no go. I don't believe there are any known technologies to provide the capabilities required. Microwave energy that can be reasonably converted back to electrical power is relatively low in frequency with today's technology. Those low frequencies aren’t collimated well. The beam would be huge by the time it made it to earth. And if it could be collimated well the power densities would fry anything that passed through it. Airplanes, birds, people, whatever. Aiming the beam at anything other than the intended receiver could be considered a large-scale weapon of mass destruction. It would destroy pretty much whatever it hit. Getting international approval for such a device would be virtually impossible because of its alternate uses. There would be no prior warning of any attack made by it. A military dream weapon…
Yes a "wobble" is there but it's not much.
Solar panels in space - made from the Moon. Now there's a project worth pursuing.
I don't know if your post is accurate.
They believe their studies will yield a viable product.
I'd like to hear more about this.
Yes, we do need to get our buns on the moon and make something of it.
I think a space elevator is more practical than this power generation idea.
100 gigawatts. Isn't that the amount of power to send the DeLorean on it's way in Back to the Future?
I think a space elevator is good too.
There can be two (and many more) good ideas.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just extremely unlikely.
It will require a technology still undiscovered.
OK, this is what I am unsure of.
When I drive around, I cross bridges. They all have spaces at the beginning and end, some even in the middle.
These spaces are built in because the bridge expands from heat. It would buckle and disintegrate if there were no spaces.
So what happens if you made a solid piece of steel, filled it with holes so you could run water through it and cool it down, painted it black, and attached one end to a gearbox that was connected to a generator?
We're talking hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of pounds of pressure per square inch as this thing heats up and expands. And you would get energy from the cooling cycle as well as the heating cycle.
It might even be efficient enough to obsolete my perpetual motion machine.
Being an engineer, one's view is based on what one can do with today's technology, not tomorrow's.
Gee, with "millions of pounds of pressure per square inch" I'd be inclined to call it a bomb... ;-)
Oh DB, you're limiting yourself.
"Ladies and gentlemen, if you look out the right side of the plane, you will see the new lunar-power receiver, just east of Flagstaff, Ari.................zzzzzzt! "
LOL!
That's why you have gears. Lotsa gears.
I think it's not a question of it working, it's a question of the number of cycles you could get before the material gave out or crystallized or whatever.
PS: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED!!!
The ability to mu-wave any surface target from space is something I'ld rather have the Anglophone nations get hold of first.
Aside from that, this would introduce energy into the Earth's 'system' which is alien to it, not stored as chemical or potential (kinetic) energy in the past, and above and beyond our normal dose of solar energy. We have just been releasing energy stored here or harnessing other energies which were present. This would add new energy to the system.
Although I like the idea, (after I retire from the oil industry), that extra energy might be a problem.
Twisted as it sounds, it might cause global warming....
(8^D)
I can see a lot of problems with this idea, many of which were put out in response to this idea 25 years ago!
1) LAUNCH COSTS! I do not think this idiot really factored in launch costs.To set up an industrially self-sufficient lunar base able to build the size PV banks he's talking about will take several thousand launches to get the equipment and people there. With the moon in darkness for two weeks, double the installation on the farside.
2) Microwave conversion to electricity will be very inefficient, especially as the power increases. Think about the fish boils you can have to cool the converters. I would bet that at the power levels he proposes, conversion efficiency will be less than 20%, if that much. SO that means an even BIGGER double installation.
3) $400-$500 billion? That would just get your initial base built! Launch costs are about $5000/lb, say your heavy lift booster puts 200000 lbs into otbit (of which at least 60% is fuel weight), this gives you $500 million per launch, for the initial cost estimate, you get 10 launches, nowhere near enough to get an industrial base built on the moon in anything like the time frame he's thinking. Remember, you're gonna have people there, so a VERY large portion of the mass sent to the moon has to be food and life support needs, assuming you can get all your water needs on the moon. I would say increase his cost estimates by a factor of 50 to 100.
3) You're gonna need several nuclear powered earth orbit-to-lunar orbit shuttle. Chemical rockets are gonna be too inefficient and costly in mass terms to be really useful. NERVA was stopped before they did any real tests. Better get busy rebuilding this program, which also means, get all those old farts still alive who worked on it back in the '60's out of retirement to teach a few younger engineers.
4) Better get busy redesigning the Saturn 5 NOW! And rebuilding the industrial infrastructure to make and assemble it. That's gonna take a few years. You're going to need several thousand of them.
OOOPS! I meant to type 100000 lbs into orbit!Monday morning fat fingers!
Where do you get your numbers and costs?
Shuttle flights cost at least $500 Million. The whole shuttle weighs about 200,000 lbs and can put up a payload of about 60000 lbs. A new heavy lift booster will cost about that much to launch, since it will have to include development costs.
My estimates on the number of launches to establish a lunar base are by quick engineering judgement, based upon the masses of industrial equipment I'm familiar with.
Also, the cynic in me has learned to discount the space cadets spins of the costs and amounts needed to do their projects (I'm still one, but a realistic space cadet)Remember how the shuttle was going to get launch costs down to a $100/lb or so? And how they were going to be launched twice a month?
Last I knew, there was no way to transmit electrical energy through air or space. I read the article, didn't learn anything about the transmission issue (maybe I skimmed the first part too fast), and the further I read the more I thought the article was a well-crafted joke!
What kind of power are they going to send? They speak of electricity, and I'm back to my opening sentence.
Doesn't matter what technique they use to generate the power...photovoltaic (which usually is stored in batteries), or solar-heated liquid/gas, which recycles, to make steam/gas to turn a turbine generator.....still has to get back to earth, and, AFAIK, there isn't any way to do that.
I'm not a physicist or engineer, but I did work as a technician for several years, installing electronic devices in remote locations. Maintaining power for the equipment was always a major consideration, and usually meant batteries had to be used, and a longer duration of equipment usage meant a heavy load of batteries, and subsequent replacements thereof.
Many the times I and my co-workers wished for a device which could beam power to a remotely-installed piece of electronic equipment.
What?!?! Add 20TWe per year of energy to our system, and it heats up? Say it ain't so . Your comment reminds me of that first exam in thermodynamics...you know...the one where they ask "if you leave the refrigerator door open, will the room get hotter or colder?"
Perhaps by the time we're out of fossil fuels, we'll need that 20TWe to keep us from reverting back to an ice age.
I would love it! But it's going to take a sustained effort of about 20 years to make this a reality and make it stick. A crash project will cost more in the long run and faces the reality of public burnout and subsequent cancellation. Do it slow and steady in increments.
The $400-$500 billion this guy estimated for an entire soalr power project would just be a down payment for building a lunar base and getting it self sufficient. I would estimate a trillion or more to make it permanen. The down payment of $500 billion dollars spent over a 20 year period would only be $2.5 billion/year period, chump change for the US government. But beyond that, private outfits may spend some once the basic infrastructure has been built.
The lunar solar power idea is a silly pipe dream. You could get better results by building fission nuke plants and trying to develop fusion nukes (just around the corner!). Selling the public a lie of cheap solar power from the moon would not be the wisest thing the government could do.
You have just endorsed Bush's Vison.
Good point.
What happens if a tsunami hits in the middle of the night while the operators are sleeping, and the rotation of the earth is changed? At 238,000 miles from the earth, even an automatic system has a 2-1/2 second lag.
Absolutely! His space proposal is a modernized of one that has been around for a long time. It's what was proposed in the middle 50's, but abandoned in the race with the Soviets.
You're thinking of 1.21 gigawatts.
Can you spell "global warming" if we can even improve to 15-20% microwave-receiver-transmission efficiencies (up from the current 5% microwave-receiver-electrical grid efficiencies?
This guy is trying to replace ALL power with beamed electricity from microwaves: Microwave-to-electrical grid efficiency would need to be 95-98% efficient to avoid massive local secondary heat effects (read: weather and thunderstorm cells around the receivers!) from the "missing" energy!
Correctomundo. Sorry, it's been a while since I've seen the movie!
Basically what is proposed is using either radio waves or light at very high energy densities directed to a site on earth. Then the receiving site converts that radio or light energy back to electricity at the receiver. It can be done, but very, very inefficiently at present. In addition to be inefficient it is also very dangerous... And obviously the earth is a moving target... Miss and fry a city, a forest or who knows what...
You have it all wrong. He's gonna run an extension cord to Earth, so electric car owners can plug in their cars and drive around with an even smugger look on their face than before.
Alright, what happened in '98?
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