I see what's happening. This is a space-based weapon designed to catch my tin hat on fire!

People who are afraid of 5G emitting a fraction of 1 W, would be delighted to have a few GW emitted as microwaves to the vicinity if their town

I think you'll find that feasibility ratings will vary as a function of how much the assessors stand to gain from what they're assessing.

Problem 1: Expensive is relative, LCOE for SSP is notionally quite low about $40-75/MWh vs $136-214/MWh for Nuclear and $29-$117 for ground PV (without any storage). The NASA study made lots of expensive assumptions like 12 fully expendable starships per 100 tons to GEO and a 10 year lifetime, also reporting data with 17 significant figures... Problem 2: SSP delivers 5.5 to 19.4x times as much power per m^2, the impact of night, seasons, clouds... ultimately capacity factors is far more of a penalty than the slightly higher losses from in space conversions, in fact even without capacity factor penalties SSP still just slightly more efficient because of the more controlled operating temperatures and higher panel collection efficiency after account for microwave conversion and transfer. Problem 3: Maintenance is a continuous cost, but depending on orbit (including GEO or Molinia) debris is a minor problem ~1% attrition cost per year. Compared to any other terrestrial power system that is exceptionally low. Cleaning solar panels is a big problem on Earth because of wind, rain, and dust. Problem 4: Land use for SSP is about 3.5 acres/MWe, on par with geothermal at 3.9 and nuclear at an industry low of 1, comparatively ground solar is 36.4 acres/MWe and coal is 48.1 acres/MWe -- yes the single collection area is large, but a fraction of a comparable solar PV collection field and has much lower land conflict Problem 5: ~70 min per year during the equinox, the same as all satellites in GEO The NASA study had a strong negative statement in the executive summary and a much more nuanced statement in the report. It was designed to let NASA bow out and still look competent if and when SSP is built. Sabine your data is factually incorrect and you seem more committed to bashing the idea rather than considering it objectively. SSP is no silver bullet, nothing is, but the it has much greater benefits economically, geopolitically, and environmentally than its notional cost. Yes a first of its kind system will be expensive, but even at $10B it has an ROI on the order of 5 years assuming a $600/kg launch price.

As an Australian familiar with our country's deserts the idea of launching solar panels into space and trying to deliver the power to the rotating Earth seems very silly. All the continents have deserts and grasslands where square kilometres of solar panels can be deployed with delivery of the power through cheap cables. All continents also have windy regions where the wind blows almost 24/7. And then there's tidal hydro power and in some places reliable volcanic heat. All of these sources are easily accessible without using a single rocket.

We've already got a giant fusion-based generator beaming energy down from space as electromagnetic radiation. We just need to build more ground stations to convert its output into electricity.

Kirk Sorenson worked in this area and came to this conclusion two decades ago, where his group had a giant spreadsheet taking into account assumptions of cost of space solar vs competitors, etc. Instantly teleporting the arrays into space for free, with Mad Max level gas prices, they still couldn't make it cost effective. This is what drove him to look at nuclear. Looks like 20 years hasn't changed much. Which makes sense, because technological improvements over that time won't change the end result when you already assumed parameters down to zero.

The original 1970s concept was to provide the raw materials from the moon and asteroids. That saves a lot of the lift costs in the long run. A big motivation was to use this as a way to bootstrap moving ALL heavy industry into space where it would no longer be polluting the earth. In addition to building appliances and vehicles, one could cheaply make "foamed steel" and create giant lifting bodies to use as reentry sleds to carry the finished goods back to Earth. Just land the buoyant sled in an ocean, unload it at the nearest port, and cut the sled up to make interesting products that need foamed steel.

So what you need is a series of "space elevators" but not to actually move things into orbit, but to be giant power cables, then you have your solar plant at the space end of each elevator. On second thought, I think I will just wait for matter/antimatter reactors - should be just 30 years after we get fusion working.

Yeah, when I heard this enthusiastically presented at a presentation 2 years ago and told that it'll cost the same as earth-based solar, I was like yeah, nah. That ain't gonna happen. Problem is that the presenter now works with us, so ... hmmm.

Nobody in the real solar business is behind these ideas. It is backed by people who just want to write documents. Signed: someone who actually works in solar.

we have already have lots of "space" here in Australia for solar, no cosmic rays either!

For 1/100th the price we could just build nuclear... But why? Everything is about political will and who is or is not being bribed it seems.

Seems we'll have to keep dusting those solar panels, guys.

Theyre doing it wrong Giant mirror satellite constellation to shine light on earth based PV, or your enemies.

I think it was Isaac Asimov who wrote a great story about such a thing, though maybe it was Arthur C. Clark. Had a robot who refused to believe people had created it, because compared to it, we suck so bad, but it was really good at beaming the energy down.

Ground based dipole array collectors may be of the order of 100 KM² but it's only rods and wires so you can grow crops underneath, you don't lose farms and parkland like you do with solar panels.

One UK organisation asking another organisation for a feasibility study does not mean that "the Brits seem to like the idea". There's an abundance of onshore and offshore wind power and terrestrial solar power available in the UK. And it's cheap as chips.

Even worse for alignment is that these arrays would be orbital statites due to solar pressure.

Stuff into orbit. That takes me back, Sabine. In the early 1980s, I talked with my father, who was a flight test engineer in ‘The Right Stuff’ era, about the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative/Star Wars plan. Engineer to the core, he said, “Well, I don’t know about all those (systems) but I do know the laws of physics haven’t changed since I left college and there’s no way we’re getting all that stuff into orbit.” Costs have come down and will go further, but it’s wise to talk to the engineers who will have to make these bright ideas work.

I "really love" when people with academic background are talking about engineering topics. I wasn't disappointed this time either. Of the mentioned problems, first one, costs, is crystal clear. Second problem, efficiency, is also clear, conversion from DC to microwave and back to DC and then to AC for grid will take a tool, but some number would help to put this in perspective. Things starts to get sketchy with the third problem, maintenance. We already have, one might say, to many satellites in orbit, and they could provide reliable data about life expectancy and degradation over time. Except for Hubble Space Telescope, all the other satellites were fire and forget, and most have a fruitfully, long life, even longer if you consider also the Voyagers. Land use is a little to high for my taste. For a 1GW receiver antenna, if you accept direct isolation of roughly 1000W/m2 as a guiding values, you need only 1 km2 (one square km) of land. Scale it up to compensate for lost efficiency and you're still orders of magnitude lower than quoted values. Yes, this is my guess, direct insolation is heating only the surface while microwaves are heating in volume, so it's not an apple to apple comparison. But even at 50 km2 with just 20W/m2 you are just reaching the efficiency of land solar panels, hopefully with better consistency year round. Last problems, temperature swings and synchronization, I'll let engineers to solve them, they're quite good at it. LEO satellites are getting in and out of earth's shadow multiple times per day for years. Phase arrays are already employed by AESA radars, Starlink antennas, you name it. The scale required for power transmission might ease or might complicate the matters.

I'm hoping one day space based power might be useful for Moon or Mars bases, as a lot of the challenges that exist at Earth (water rich atmosphere, crowded orbit etc) don't exist. And it'd still be really expensive, but so would any other solution.

The solution for the technical difficulties and inefficiencies of beaming it down is that we move to space... If not we ourselves, at least our energy consumption. If we can put solar panels measuring kilometers into space, we can upload a few data centers and do our cloud computing up there.

We're still blowing each other up. We're not ready for this yet

The simple economics is this: For the cost of a real space based installation, we could slap a solar farm in multiple spots on earth, with the power line infrastructure, and you could then have at least one of them getting sunlight most of the time. Now there could come a day far in the future where space makes sense. But we have just gobs and gobs of cheap land on earth right now we can use for solar farms, until that starts to dwindle it just doesn't make sense to look to space.

Ideas like this, I suspect, are aimed at subsidising a space economy. The known problem with a space economy is that you need one in order to develop one. So starting with something that will be useful on earth, even if of questionable economics and feasibility, sounds like an attractive idea.

I’m not sure this kills the idea. Just kills it in the 2020s-30s. First, advocates of power satellites (of any variety) tend to hope we can source the material from the moon or asteroids. Launch costs are thus negligible. Second, the rectennas are likely to be far less intensive uses of any given area of land that photovoltaic panels, because they’re basically just wire meshes. You could put them over farmland without any disruption to current use. Third, most proposals involve positioning the satellites at much higher orbits than most current satellites, mitigating debris concerns.

I first heard of such proposals when I was a kid in High School...in 1974. 50 years later, it's good to see that my Science Teacher was right!

Extract energy from dreams would be the next step.

The phased array is very nice but there is a great deal off loss of energy from the perimeter.

Wild. During my freshman year of college as a physics major (in 1993-94), I thought of this idea - i.e. capturing solar energy from the sun reflected off of mirrored satellites and directed at a target to capture the energy. And then I dismissed it just as quickly when I realized how easily it would more likely be used as a weapon to kill someone from space. It's wild that anyone is even contemplating this still.

Any "optimistic" projections of launch cost, etc. that might make space-based solar power potentially competitive with ground-based renewables, must contend with similatly optimistic projections of ground-based renewables and storage continuing to come down in price and increase in efficiency. I dont think those two sets of competing optimistic projection curves will ever cross.

On the other hand space based solar power may make sense for directing power around solar system and of course, this would be fairly far in the future

Birds falling out of the sky, cooked, could by a solution to another problem...

Thank you for the video.

Ich habe Hochfrequenztechnik studiert in den 1980er Jahren, und die Aufgabe mit der Energieübertragung zur Erde gehörte zu den Standardaufgaben. Es gab im wesentlichen 3 Probleme: Größe der terrestrischen Empfangsantenne, Durchmesser ca. 200km und ausgeprägt als Hohlspiegel mit ca 1 km Tiefe. Zweitens die Wahl der Frequenz, Stichwort H2O Resonanz in der Atmosphäre. Drittens Die Kreiselstabilisierung des Sendesatelliten, der eiert herum und muss aus geostationärer Entfernung von 40.000km trotzdem den 200km Hohlspiegel treffen, der ja nicht verstellbar ist wie eine Standard-Satellitenantenne einer Erdfunkstelle. Die Leistungsdichte im Bereich des Hohlspiegels war gering genug, um keinen Schaden beim Überqueren des Spiegels anzurichten.

As a consulting engineer, I will be happy to study this. Here is a piece of paper with "Proposal" at the top, otherwise it's blank. If you have money to spend, please fill out the rest.

In terms of receiving energy and land use, I can envision having "flying battery" space plane drones in the upper atmosphere that both store energy and are powered by focused high power beams, and can land where energy is needed when they're full.

Sabine, thank-you for your efforts. Love your merch. Did your red phone get disconnected?

Thanks S.H.

Another drawback is that it may be easy to destroy by enemy countries during a war.

Sabine is always throwing cold water on our hopes and dreams.

One key advantage of SBSP is its practically infinite scalability. Addressing the issue of power density of a rectenna, one could start pondering stratospheric stations, akin to small space elevators that can receive more power per unit area - whether that’s feasible would depend on our ability to focus the beam.

nicely done, thank you

They don't seem to have any issues with throwing money at unworkable projects. I bet they go ahead with this anyway

🔭I have an interesting question for a next video: Matter that falls into a black hole falls in very quickly from the perspective of the matter. For a distant observer, the matter will appear to freeze right before crossing the event horizon because time dilation is so incredibly strong at the event horizon. Even after trillions of years, the matter still appears "frozen" at the event horizon. In fact, from the distant observer's perspective, it will take an infinite amount of time for the matter to cross the event horizon. 1. Question: How can you explain this paradoxical situation where, on the one hand, the matter does cross the event horizon, and on the other hand, it will never cross the event horizon? 2. Question: This also means that the black hole will evaporate due to Hawking radiation before the matter crosses the event horizon. How can you explain this?

In space conversion is silly. The right approach is space based mirrors that reflect sunlight to ground based solar panels. 24 hours of light, increases the output of the solar farm by a factor of 4, and eliminated the need for storage. The mirrors consist of a 3D gyroscope to push against to steer the mirror, and a communication link in case the solar farm changes due to cloud cover, and circuitry to maintain the aim. There is little to break, cheap to build, and light enough that getting them into orbit is easy. They will need to be in high orbit, but they are mirrors / solar sails. They can get themselves from low orbit to high orbit. Being solar sails, they will have an elliptical orbit, pushed out with the sun, and back in when against the sun. We can even do a proof of concept using existing ground based solar farms. If there is concern about light pollution, solar panels work best from red to IR. Use mirrors that reflect the IR.

I love the effort that you put into these video's - the sound effects n 'ting

Thank you, I already thought, that there is no way to the land of cockaigne, where roasted pigeons fall down from the sky.

NASA also abandoned the idea of reusable rockets.

My recall, which is not as good as it once was, is that Glaser in 1973 got a patent for beaming down energy from space. It took awhile but someone finally did what should have been done and they "ran the numbers" to show that efficiency among other aspects was very poor. The program dropped from sight.

How about a presentation on the space elevator?

It was calculated just known current reserves of thorium is enough to power the whole planet for either 1000 years or 10 000. Either way we would have better power generation figured out by then... The cost for power was calculated to be 1/20th current rates in California for the consumer. The problem is it costs more to build thorium power plants but hardly anyone is working on that issue. Imagine if all the funds going into fusion were put into just developing a cheaper way to build thorium plants we'd have extremely cheap power for the planet. THEN work on fusion.

Nice barrels

Powering equipment on the Moon with such an orbital solar installation makes some sense.

The moment you said the collector station for one beam needed to be the size of Manhattan is when i realized there is no point of space-based solar because that area could just as well be devoted to solar arrays itself. Mahattan covers 87 square kilometers. A solar panel produces about 1.5kWh per day and has an area 1.6 sq meters so it produces about 1kWh per square meter. One km^2 is 10^6 m^2. Thus 87 km^2 would produce 87,000 MWh. The UK uses 100 TWh per year or 274,000 MWh per day. You'd need 3.14 Manhattans covered in solar panels to supply the UKs electricity. It would be way cheaper to maintain solar panels on earth than in space. Hence obviously more efficient.

Don't try to reduce air travel for meetings when we have streaming but make the little people get rid of plastic straws haha

Harnessing the energy of bad jokes 🤣🤣🤣🤣 stronger than anti matter Vs matter collision 💥

1) Transferring energy from space would be inefficient, although it could make economic sense since the source is free. 2) Large temperature swings could only be handled with diamond electronics which is still at a newborn stage. 3) Would those solar base stations be based above or below Elon Musk's satellites? There may be an issue there. 4) What about satellites colliding with those large objects? 5) Could shadow on the Earth be tolerable? 6) Would placing large optical concentrators/mirrors in space and sending down a light beam hot enough to boil water, produce steam, and run electric turbines on the ground be a good idea? 7) High energy from space could be used as a space weapon. Scanning the beam over a country and burning everything down would be possible.

And who were the people who though that nuclear fission is too dangerous and too expensive.

Sounds like nuclear is still the best option for power hat is reliable, clean, safe, and affordable. I wonder if policy makers will ever discover nuclear power.

Can we just make uranium 235 from uranium 238 in space? 🎉🎉🎉

'Substantial percentage' of power needs at a 'substantial percentage' of GDP. I suspect these two substantials are not the same.

Build it on the Moon instead. You can even install protective measures and use the materials present on the Moon.

Solar energy beamed from space sounds like a cover for a new weapon system. If they are able to find a way to make that phased array work, it's not a huge leap to focus the beam to a tighter spot at a different location. This sort of system would also be pretty robust to adversary attacks. Think about a a few satellites destroyed like a few dead pixels on your screen or camera sensor.

Space based solar is one of these solutions in search of a problem. It's beyond be why governments spend just 100 quids on that. Solution for the actual problem, climate change, is much easier: use that space on your rooftop rather than space in earth orbit. Working perfectly fine and thus totally boring. Which is probably the reason why orbit-space solar gets all the funding.

What about skipping the "laser beam from space" part and instead putting supercomputers up there. So we would just offset the power from land grid to space grid, and then beam down just the data. ?

Japan's energy teleportation was a research I remember they had in mind to recieve solar from space. Last time I remember, small teleportation was able, but not to a level feasible.

By the way, petroleum is a space-based energy source, and it is renewable after a few hundred million years.

This is just one more way to funnel tax money into "research" that leads to nothing, but gives good income to a lot of people for doing nothing.

Hey Sabine: have you ever heard of the Kardashev Scale?

This was always a ridiculous idea. Space based solar is great for space based applications. If we want reliable ‘green’ energy, we should focus on nuclear power while advancing battery technology.

Hallelujah!!! I’m the favorite, $60,000 every week! Now I can afford anything and also support the work of God and the church.

Nuclear!

Link to the cited articles?

Have they looked at the impact of increasing space debris on these giant targets, I mean arrays? Many solar panels on earth lose most of their activity if even a small section of them gets shaded. It seems possible that a small space impact could shut down large sections of the orbiting array.

How about standardizing nuclear energy 🤔🤔 that would probably be cheaper

No energy source is as cheap as petroleum. How else could you move a 3,000 pound truck, 1 mile a minute, for less a dime? We need to get hydrogen and solar as efficient as gas. We have built our megalopolis around millions of years of stored energy. If we fall back to using a days worth of energy then hundreds of millions of people will starve. And why aren’t we working in perfecting the thermal diode?

The big benefit of putting solar power in space is that it gets rid of the intermittency problem that makes Earth-based solar power impossible to use as a baseload power source on Earth without large amounts of energy storage. Additionally it skips the problem that large parts of the solar energy is stopped by the atmosphere, and it reduces the land requirements compared to regular solar. (The ground underneath the receivers could be used for e.g. farming as well, since it just has to be a sort of mesh structure.) But yes, it's very costly with current technology. I'm pretty sure we will see it become an important part of the energy system once we've industrialized the Moon or near-Earth asteroids, though, since that would mean that the cost of getting the solar panels up there is reduced dramatically. We'll probably need a lot of nuclear while we wait for that though.

Price for space-based anything is directly proportional to price per tonn delivered into space. If it drops dramatically (starship is almost there), price cost of energy would follow. Space delivery prices already dropped significantly and race to the bottom is just yet started

I can imagine that even if feasible, the problem will be the expenditures for the program. All I can think of (to make it work I guess; still maybe expensive) is some sort of power storage system (large batteries, power cell, etc. bank), which could later be transferred back to earth. There may be some engineering problems to work around, but I hope that sounds reasonable. The problem is that it still sounds very expensive (material costs, the return process, the amount of fuel to transport is to be the satellite power bank into orbit, perserving the energy from discharge, etc.)

We have a bajillion acres of empty roofs and even more empty deserts. You could probably pave over the entire state of Nevada, and power the entire world for the cost of one of these spaced based solar power installations.

I recall hearing Kirk Sorensen during a Thorium reactor talk saying that he’d been working on the space solar power problem when he was at NASA and that it’ll never happen. It’s fine for use in orbit or in space, but beaming through the atmosphere and receiving it on the surface is just too hard to do economically.

in the 1990s, Russia thought about improving living condition and farming yields in their northern regions through enormous solar mirrors directing more sunlight to these regions. it was called Znamya. with a mere 25 meter mirror, managed to illuminate a 7 km spot with the brightness of 5x-10x full moons. it was abondened after the second prototype had a mechanical failure during deployment.

There are so many videos about busted "wireless charging your mobile one meter away by beam-forming". Even all REALLY knowledgeable companies scrapped that idea due to efficiency issues. Now we have the same on a slightly larger scale :D.

The best idea I saw had the receiver station in the arctic and the array at a Lagrange point. Solved a lot of problem, but not the biggest one which was getting it there.

When an idea sounds way out there, it usually is. The things that work appear mundane because, well, they work and suddenly it's not so special anymore.

They're doing it wrong. You put a giant magnifying glass space station, guided by GPS, to focus the sun down to a capture station. It could transfer the accumulated heat to a lithium salt, which would become molten, and transfer the stored heat to water to run a turbine. If properly insulated, molten lithium salt can retain heat in excess of 1000 degrees for a week. It would be a closed system and create only some steam as a by product. We already have space based solar power, it's called The Sun.

Thanks for this, I was almost going to go into this!!

You also need energy to keep them in orbit. Orbits will constantly decay and that requires fuel (ie energy).

Wow, I am blessed to have such a channel on youtube. It scientific to the point where I can understand 'almost' everything, with a bit of my own research. Amazing.

These solar panel in space would also be solar sails, how do you handle the drifting, how much propellant wold that need?

There needs to be an official list of 'Interested Ideas That Just Won't Work' and I'm pretty sure that would be in or very close to the top ten.

When I first heard of this idea my first thought was that it would cook something that shouldn't be cooked.

There has been a prototype in orbit for a while now. It's already surpassed it's expected mission time and going strong. I'm hopeful this will become an economically viable option once Startship is operational.

"We intercept the sunlight while it's still up there, and we send it to a large receiver down here" Why not build a solar panel down here? The light is coming down.

I wrote an essay about space-based solar power when I was at primary school, 40 years ago!

Thruster malfunctions and all the microwave popcorn at the grocery store explodes

falling, fully roasted birds is not an entirely bad idea

Probably one of many projects which won't become cost effective until space mining and refining are operational, when using tons of materials in space no longer means lifting it from the ground first. And probably energy harvested in space will still be most useful in space.