Pete Dupont is writing in the Wall Street Journal about new energy sources in general, and power from space in particular. (Thanks to Mark Whittington for the heads up.)

I haven't blogged about this subject much, or perhaps even at all. That's surprising, because I probably know more about it than almost anyone--I'm certainly in the top one hundred on the planet. I wrote a term paper in college about it back in the late seventies, I reviewed some of the DOE/NASA work when I worked at the Aerospace Corporation a couple decades ago, and I was the program manager for it at Rockwell about ten years ago, when the Clinton/Gore Administration came in, and we fantasized that we could sell it to Gore as a clean/green-energy solution. I also came up with some alternative architectures to the one that Dupont describes in the Journal piece (he's describing the original DOE/NASA concept, which was almost certainly never practical or economically viable).

I don't have time to post much on this right now, because I have to work on my Apollo 17 commemoration, but it's probably worth expanding on, given that energy is such a critical foreign-policy issue right now (Kyoto and the Middle East). Maybe in a couple days.

You can find a lot of information about space
based energy sources at Jerry Pournelle's site.
Former DOD and Nasa advisor. Very interesting.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/currentview.html

You can find a lot of information about space
based energy sources at Jerry Pournelle's site.
Former DOD and Nasa advisor. Very interesting.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/currentview.html

Is there anything to this?... http://www.genesisworldenergy.org/technology.htm

A while back USS Clueless ran some numbers regarding why fossil fuels have no reasonable replacement for now. I'd be interested in seeing someone run the numbers regarding what percentage of our energy needs could come from space? Would getting closer to the sun with an array of devices help (an energy internet?)

You'd have to be able to recoup the energy cost to get the array closer to the sun, as well as any energy costs incurred by the longer distance to the station. Also, if the power is transferred by radiation (say, microwave radiation) there's the added logistical issue of LOS change to the ground station(s). I believe most concepts have the powersats at geostationary orbit, but it's possible (I'd think) to put the powersats in closer to the sun and have transfer stations in geostationary orbit. You'd just lose some power in the act of relaying it.

The prospect of beaming down tens of gigawatts down to ground level should give one pause. The accidental consequences of a malfunction in the beam focusing/steering systems could be quite severe. Deliberate screwing with aforementioned systems could result in vaporization of some rather large landmarks, assuming you could focus sufficiently well. Still, you could kill lots of people and, more importantly, lots of little creatures and trees(j/k).

And how do you get that much power through the atmosphere without losing even a little bit of it to heat?

Interesting problem. If we ever make a dent in solving it, we could do some marvelous things.