WASHINGTON — Advocates of space-based solar power are criticizing a NASA report that offered a skeptical assessment of that technology’s ability to provide low-cost green energy.
The report, released Jan. 10 by NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy (OTPS), examined two previously published architectures for generating electrical power in space and transmitting it to Earth by microwaves, known as space-based solar power (SBSP). The report calculated the lifecycle costs of those architectures as well as the greenhouse emissions their development would produce.
The report concluded that one architecture would produce electricity at a cost of $0.61 per kilowatt-hour, and the other at $1.59 per kilowatt-hour. By contrast, terrestrial renewable systems, such as wind, hydropower and terrestrial solar plants, produce energy at $0.02 to $0.05 per kilowatt-hour.
The report also found that the greenhouse gas “emission intensity” of the SBSP systems, or the amount of greenhouse gases produced from building and launching the systems, was much less than the average of the U.S. electric grid today, but similar to terrestrial renewable systems.
“We found that these space-based solar power designs are expensive. They are 12 to 80 times more expensive than if you were going to have renewable energy on the ground,” said Erica Rodgers, science and technology partnership forum lead in NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist, in a presentation at the AIAA SciTech Forum conference where the agency released the report.
However, advocates of SBSP have criticized NASA’s cost assessment, in particular the assumptions used for it. “The things that I thought were most admirable were the general methodology, the modeling and the economic emphasis,” said John Mankins, a former NASA official who led an earlier agency study of SBSP in the late 1990s, of the new report in an interview. “They looked at lots of different cases and tried to…
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