Transition Team Recommends Focus on Space Solar Power

President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team has published a white paper persuading the new administration to attach a significantly higher focus on space solar power (SSP). “Space Solar Power: A Solution for Energy Independence & Climate Change” addresses SSP as the prime candidate for alleviating present global energy concerns. The paper was prepared by the Space Frontier Foundation and published for public comment by the transition team.

So far, the paper claims, space solar power is largely ignored because no federal agency is responsible for encouraging any such program. The U.S. Department of Energy sees it as a space issue and therefore NASA’s responsibility. NASA, on the other hand, sees it as an energy issue and therefore the DOE’s problem. Meanwhile any pursuit of SSP is mired in federal bureaucracy.

Why is SSP so advantageous? The paper cites a report by the National Security Space Office (NSSO), which points out these benefits:

• Scalable. Space solar power can be scaled to provide a high standard of living to the entire world.
• Availability. SSP can easily be made readily available to every country in the world, especially developing countries that are in desperate need of wide scale, affordable energy distribution.
• Intermittency. SSP is not subject to intermittency issues that plague solar on earth. There are no weather, seasonal, or day-night barriers.
• No Breakthroughs Necessary. There need not be any fundamental breakthroughs in science and engineering to implement space solar power, a sizable hurdle for renewable energy industries at ground level.
• Export and Flexibility. Harnessing SSP now could make the United States a net energy exporter in the near-term.

The key barrier to SSP is economics. It is generally accepted that SSP, for all its advantages, is not economically feasible. This white paper disagrees, stating that an application of the processes (research, technical demonstrations, government incentives) that are already applied to renewable technologies on earth could solve this problem.

The paper also puts forth several recommendations, including assigning a federal agency to oversee SSP and providing competitive funding to the project. The report points out that the federal government spends $300 million per year on fusion energy research and that space based solar power could grow rapidly given an equal amount of funds.

Since being published a few weeks ago, the SSP white paper has already been commented on nearly 600 times, making it one of the highest-reviewed papers the transition team has published.

Posted on January 8th in Solar News by Dan.