The scene: An area-based solar energy station known as the Converter being commissioned a while within the Future. The characters: Two astronauts, Powell and Donovan, and a robotic named QT-1 (“Cutie” to its human associates). The plot: The astronauts are coaching Cutie to take over the station’s operations, which contain gathering photo voltaic vitality in house after which directing it as intense beams of microwaves all the way down to Earth.
That is the backdrop for Isaac Asimov’s 1941 brief story “Cause.” Many of the story facilities round Asimov’s Three Legal guidelines of Robotics and the people’ relationship with the robotic. However the station itself is price a re-examination. It’s fairly clear Asimov had no thought how a system just like the Converter would truly work, besides in essentially the most fundamental phrases. Right here’s how Powell tries to clarify it to Cutie:
“Our beams feed these worlds vitality drawn from a type of big incandescent globes that occurs to be close to us. We name that globe the Solar and it’s on the opposite facet of the station the place you possibly can’t see it.”
Harnessing the ability of the solar in house is definitely an attractive thought. A decade in the past we featured a challenge on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company that aimed to launch a 1-gigawatt photo voltaic station by 2031. As a step in that route, JAXA says it can exhibit a small satellite tv for pc transmitting 1 kilowatt of energy to Earth from an altitude of 400 kilometers subsequent 12 months. We’ve additionally reported on Caltech’s SSPD-1 demonstrator challenge and the US $100 million from a billionaire donor who funds it.
An area photo voltaic challenge would “waste capital that might be higher spent enhancing much less dangerous methods to shore up renewable vitality, comparable to batteries, hydrogen, and grid enhancements.”
And but, space-based solar energy stays extra science fiction than science reality, as Henri Barde writes in “Castles within the Sky?” Barde ought to know: He just lately retired from the European House Company, the place amongst different issues he evaluated house energy programs. As Barde’s article makes abundantly clear, this clear vitality would come at an infinite price, if it may be finished in any respect, “[wasting] capital that might be higher spent enhancing much less dangerous methods to shore up renewable vitality, comparable to batteries, hydrogen, and grid enhancements.”
For instance, U.Okay.-based House Photo voltaic estimates it can want 68 (!) SpaceX Starship launches to loft all of the belongings needed to construct one 1.7-km-long photo voltaic array in orbit. Nevermind that SpaceX hasn’t but efficiently launched a Starship into orbit and introduced it again in a single piece. Even when the corporate can ultimately get the worth all the way down to $10 million per launch, we’re nonetheless speaking lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in launch prices alone. We additionally don’t have real-life Cuties to construct such a station. And the bottom stations and rectennas needed for receiving the beamed energy and placing it on the grid are nonetheless simply distant dots on a highway map in somebody’s multimillion greenback analysis proposal.
Engineers are sometimes impressed by science fiction. However inspiration solely will get you up to now. House-based solar energy will stay sci-fi fodder for the foreseeable future. For the monumental process of electrifying all the pieces whereas decreasing greenhouse fuel emissions, it’s higher to concentrate on options based mostly on know-how already in hand, like standard geothermal, nuclear, wind, and Earth-based photo voltaic, slightly than losing time, brainpower, and cash on a fantasy.
This text seems within the June 2024 print subject as “The Chasm Between Creativeness and Feasibility.”
