Could Space-Based Solar Save The World? | Answers With Joe

this video supported by curiosity stream we've heard a lot lately about SpaceX and StarLink project the idea of putting 6000 satellites up in a constellation around the world to provide high-speed Internet to everybody on the planet a test launch of 60 satellites just went up about a month or so ago and of course there was all this doomsday predictions that we're gonna blot out the sky and you'll never see stars again and all that nonsense to be fair there are real concerns around this level of putting stuff in space but just some of the rhetoric was completely over the top the idea behind star link is it'll be a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit that will bounce messages and internet from one satellite to another to get it around you know to where it needs to go in the world this has a number of advantages most notably lower latency because satellite internet right now has to go all the way out to talk geostationary orbit which is way out there this is very low Earth orbit so it will go a lot faster also being such low Earth orbit at the end of the lives of these satellites they'll naturally decay and burn up in the atmosphere instead of adding to orbital debris but the real advantage is it would make the internet available affordably to everybody in the world an entire village could be supported using just a receiver the size of a pizza box for about 200 dollars this would not only connect remote parts of the world but it could spur innovations that we can't even think of now but you know something else that underserved communities need is power as their technological advancement continues their power usage is gonna go up as well what with climate issues and resource depletion we're running into a real crisis here could a StarLink type technology be a solution for that as well if we could have StarLink could we also have star power entire playlists have been done on this channel about the need for sustainable sources of energy if we're gonna continue to thrive on this planet fossil fuels have to get phased out they they just have to at this point and that's not because I'm anti fossil fuels I said many many times and if it wasn't for fossil fuels the world wouldn't be what it is today but where we are today is at a place where we can't continue to grow on that technology it's it's time to move on to something else I mean even if you don't believe in climate change which I'm sorry but if you don't believe in climate change at this point you're basically a flat earther it is still a finite resource it's going to be more expensive than less and less we have of it until we don't have it anymore nuclear for example doesn't have the same atmospheric problems that fossil fuels do and it should be a much bigger part of the conversation but that doesn't mean it's perfect it has some downsides of its own it creates dangerous waste that has to be stored for hundreds of years in the best case scenario there have been high-profile meltdowns and make the whole thing look a lot more dangerous than it actually is but it also is based on a limited supply of uranium that has to be mined and refined and processed uranium that can also be weaponized so there's that fusion energy would kind of be the best of all possible worlds but I mean no but one thing there's an unlimited supply of is the Sun for the next several billion years anyway the Sun is basically a perfect power source I mean really it is enough energy hits the Earth from the Sun every hour to power the entire world for a year obviously if we captured all that it'd be a very dark hour but point is we have more than a solar energy to handle all our needs and solar is on the rise the number of installations go up every single year the price of solar panels is going down all the time and more people now work in the solar industry than worked in the coal industry so it's a good thing but there is one glaring problem with solar energy it only works half the time and they stop producing energy at the exact time every day that everybody's turning their lights on which creates a little bit of a curve in grass which kind of looks like a duck so it's now been called the duck curve now concentrated solar installations kind of get around that problem by focusing all of this energy on molten salt which then stays hot throughout the night and continues to produce energy throughout the night but those are huge and massive and really expensive and probably deserve a video of all their own PV solar has to be paired up with massive batteries so they can continue to put out power during the times when they're not producing energy which I must reiterate is half the time if only there was a place where the Sun is always shining oh wait a second Oh in space no one can hear you scream and the reason you're screaming is because you can't get out of the Sun which is hitting you at 120 degrees Celsius so hey just put the solar panels in space and beam the energy back down to the ground not only getting energy 24 hours a day you don't have the atmosphere and the clouds dissipating it you're getting all the frequencies of the spectrum and you're getting like twice as much as you get on the ground and boom space-based solar power it's not a new idea Isaac Asimov was writing about it in his books back in the 1940s but it first got a serious look by Pieter Glaser in the 1960s Pieter Glaser actually worked on the Apollo program and helped designer an instrument that was left on the moon by Apollo 11 called the lunar ranging retro reflector array this is basically a mirror that you can use to bounce lasers off of from the earth so that you can measure how far away the moon is still in use today but he later became known as the father of space-based solar power after patenting an idea in 1973 in a paper titled method and apparatus for converting solar radiation into electrical power the idea is pretty simple put massive solar arrays up in space that collect the sun's energy and then beam it back down to the receiving stations down the earth in microwave or laser form in the mid 90s the idea got a fresh look from NASA in the series of studies that they called the fresh look studies the fresh look studies were done to determine whether or not you can actually do this at a reasonable rate that compared with other types of energy production here on the earth and they came down to basically three different alternatives a sun-synchronous low Earth orbit constellation a middle Earth orbit multiple inclination constellation are one or more standalone geostationary Earth orbit satellites serving single dedicated ground States in the end they decided this was an idea that really was worth paying attention to and then they stopped paying attention to it in 2007 the United States national security space office took a look at the idea they wanted to see if this was something that could kind of help reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources some sort of a national security element to it and they also worked with the Department of Defense on the idea that this could actually provide power or to military units all around the world anytime they need it in the end they came up with four recommendations of the US government on how to move forward on this and if that doesn't sound bullish enough this is an actual line from their report considering the development time scales that are involved in the exponential growth of population and resource pressures within that same strategic period it's imperative that this work for drilling up versus drilling down for energy security begins immediately spoiler alert that didn't happen in 2009 and 2010 a number of studies and plans were made by JAXA the Japanese Space Agency EAD as Astrium a spaceflight company that was eventually bought out by Airbus and Pacific Gas and Electric actually made a deal with a company called solar rent to provide space-based solar power and finally in 2011 the International Association of astronomic stood out a report called the first international assessment of space solar power and they basically said this quote there are no fundamental technical barriers that would prevent the realization of large scale SPS platforms during the coming decades unquote the report highlighted what they consider to be the three most viable options which they named SPS 1 2 & 3 SPS type 1 is basically a very large PV panel array in space imagine a solar farm on earth well that floating in space collecting solar power and beaming the energy down to a collector on earth with a microwave beam this was the idea that NASA first examined back in 1979 with a project that they called the solar power satellite reference system today a team at Caltech is working on satellites to unfold massive solar panels from relatively small launch payloads using origami these satellites within a symbol and a massive solar arrays connected to transmission modules that was empowered back to earth the SPS type 2 system also uses massive solar arrays in space but they use laser technology instead of microwave to transmit and the SPS type 3 system is more of a reflective kind of system the idea being that mirrors are much lighter and cheaper and easier to get up into space than solar panels so why not collect all that light with mirrors and bounce them down into smaller PV panels that actually convert that into electricity this way you can collect a lot more light for a lot less money JAXA is looking at a system like this using two large solar reflectors focusing their light onto collectors in the middle that can berth energy in the microwaves and beam them down to the surface a similar project from NASA called SPS alpha would build a giant bell-shaped array that kind of captures all the energy and funnels it down onto small PV collector before beaming it down now all of these plans call for possibly hundreds of different pieces that have to be launched up into space and then reassembled once they're up there that's case scenario they all had the ability to sort of autonomously dock with each other and assemble themselves like that middle case scenario you need to remote control robots to handle it up there in the worst case scenario actual humans are gonna have to go up there and do construction in space to put these together but however you build it you're gonna have to put one way or another a whole bunch of stuff up in outer space of course there is a guy who already runs a space launch company and a solar company and he's already doing something kind of similar to this putting a whole bunch of stuff up for enternet Elon Musk he maybe more than anybody else in the world has the best reason and capability for being able to actually make this happen and here's what he has to say about it let me tell you one of my pet peeves space solar power okay the stupidest thing ever and if anybody should think it should like say solar power it should be me but but it's like super obviously not gonna work you think you know I know it's gonna I guarantee you it's gonna come up another ten fine love of god yeah he's not a fan the reason it gives is that when you do this you have to make three different conversions which is the photons from the Sun into electrons and then electrons back into photons beaming it back down to the Earth's surface which has to get converted back into electrons again and these conversions cost a little bit in the conversion process they're not perfectly efficient in fact by the time you get through all three of those conversions only nine percent of that energy is left so even though these space solar cells are getting twice as much energy hitting them up there in space by the time it gets down to the ground and converted and used it's not really that much more than a ground-based solar installation so yeah why go through the trouble of putting all this stuff up into space well again the advantage of space-based solar power is it's able to create energy at night which terrestrial solar power just can't do unless you have a massive battery backup which Elon does it basically comes down to what costs more you know putting massive solar farms up into space and then beaming them down to what is essentially another massive solar farm on the ground or just having a giant battery backup even with space launch costs going down it's still several thousand dollars per kilogram to put stuff up into space and in fact estimates have said that you'll get a Giga power station up into the space and the orbit would be a round of trillion dollars there's just no way to make that cost competitive so Elon is bet and frankly the bed of many experts out there is on energy storage solutions that in a decentralized grid of energy and storage that can just you know create power wherever it's needed again there's no shortage of solar energy hitting our planet it's just a matter of capturing it now there is one use case of space-based solar power that actually does make more economical sense on the moon there's been a ton of talk about going back to the moon lately and one of the many many issues we're gonna have to work out when we get to the moon it's how we produce energy their solar panels obviously get the job done but they have the same problems on the moon that they have down here at earth being that they can't produce any energy at night the difference is on the moon at night last two weeks the moon is tidally locked with the earth and it rotates around the earth once every month so it's in a day and night cycle of two weeks this is a problem for solar power so some of our first plans for putting up actual bases on the moon or colonies on the moon actually you're looking at Shackleton crater which is at the South Pole because it's believed that there's water ice down there that never actually gets hit by the Sun water is important for obvious reasons but another reason for colonizing the poles is that they're actually in sunlight all year long so you can set up solar installations around the base and have power year-round so unless we plan on only colonizing the poles we're gonna have to have some source of base load power that can work in darkness for two weeks at a time there are a lot of options out there nuclear is one of them in this book Artemis and II we're actually described a situation where an aluminum smelting plant was creating oxygen and power as a byproduct of the smelting process that of course would be a huge construction project and way down the road Artemis if you haven't heard is the name that NASA has given to their new moon missions so Amy we're kind of kind of predicted the future but in the early days of moon colonization we're not gonna have huge nuclear plants or smelting factories up there and this is where the whole batteries versus solar power thing kind of gets flipped on its head anybody with an electric car can tell you the battery storage is not light it's actually very very dense very heavy and we're gonna have to put a whole lot of it up into space and take it all the way to the moon which is a very long distance and then once we get it there we have to land it and again you're gonna need a lot of battery storage enough to last two weeks we might find it significantly less expensive to just fly up some solar panels or some mirrors and bounce that light around to the other side of the moon onto a solar power station on the ground which was already there in the first place and we might find as we often do with any kind of space travel that the innovations and technologies that we create up there actually have some kind of benefit down here on earth and maybe it by that point starship will be a thing new Glynn will be a thing in the cost of you know space travel and launching things into space would be far less and this might be more feasible so while it does definitely have its detractors space-based solar power definitely needs to be part of the conversation it might be one of those options we need to consider when we're looking at all our different clean energy options but that's just my opinion tell me what you think down in the comments is that the dumbest idea ever or is it a great idea just waiting for the economics to work out by the way I've talked about the Artemis missions just a second ago and all the challenges that are gonna be in front of us as we setup moon bases and stuff like that one place if you really want to take a deeper dive into that subject is a documentary called return to the moon on curiosity string return to the moon takes a look at what went wrong after the Apollo missions how we went from the triumphs of landing on the moon the disappointment of never returning and what efforts are being made today to change that takes a look at both NASA's plans with their Artemis missions as well as private programs and how they can work together because teamwork 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 431,934

Rating: 4.8464952 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, solar energy, renewable energy, elon musk, starlink, starship, new glenn, sps alpha, JAXA, space based solar, battery storage solutions, spacex, sustainable energy, photovoltaic panels

Id: bveGhdtlFn0

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Truckerontherun]

I don't know. Giant space lasers is usually how supervillains get started

[u/SpacePort-Terra]

yes it can. The key tech needed is simply an engineering issue of scaling up production on two-photon lithography. From there, launch costs plummet.

[u/h0ser]

It's really not worth it. The conversion to different forms of energy in order to transmit the power and then reintegrate it into the grid creates a giant loss of power by the time it's usable on Earth.