Palau May Get Satellite Power In the Next Decade

davidwr writes "The island nation of Palau is looking into creating a satellite-to-ground power transmission system. The system would use low-orbit satellites to transmit power to a receiver in bursts, unlike some other plans which rely on geostationary satellites. The initial 1-megawatt project is supposed to go online 'as early as' 2012 for a cost of $0.8 billion. Time will tell if this can be made cost-effective compared to traditional solar or other sources of power."

why Palau?

[xubu_caapn (1086401)]

so why Palau? is the fact that its an island nation preferable for this technology?

Re:

[jpu8086 (682572)]

because you can only have so many diesel generators on an island.

Something about water and melanin

[C10H14N2 (640033)]

Brown people surrounded by large bodies of water are better equipped to deal with being bombarded by intense solar radiation than white people surrounded by large buildings.

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[Tablizer (95088)]

[Why do it first on an island?] Brown people surrounded by large bodies of water are better equipped to deal with being bombarded by intense solar radiation than white people surrounded by large buildings.

If I was modding this, I would be dumbfounded to find an appropriate mod tag. It makes you think, but just smells sooooo wrong.
     

Re:Something about water and melanin

[Ignis Flatus (689403)]

it may be right, but for the wrong reasons. skin color isn't going to make a difference when being hit by a misaligned microwave beam. use white and brown eggs in your own microwave to test this theory.

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[hoggoth (414195)]

> it may be right, but for the wrong reasons. skin color isn't going to make a difference when being hit by a misaligned microwave beam. use white and brown eggs in your own microwave to test this theory.

Oh, he's right for the right reasons.
The U.S. has a history of testing their weapons on brown people first.

Just a demo

[dunadan67 (689682)]

The description here is a bit misleading. From the sound of the article, Palau is really just a testbed for this technology. I'm assuming that they aren't footing any of the bill that is about 6X their GDP.

Re:Just a demo

[gerrytucker (981939)]

I normally don't take the time to reply to Slashdot posts, but for some reason this response really jumped out at me. After really reading the article, not just one paragraph out of context, the reader clearly understands that a U.S. business man proposed this demo at an international conference and has German and Swiss partners in the project. Furthermore, they are going to be using one of the uninhabited islands as a safety precaution. The only mention of the U.S. military is that they did a 75 page study on the idea of transmitting power for military operations. After that, it only talks about the businessmen. Hardly the picture of the "war machine" pushing around a tiny nation which for some reason was scored as Informative.

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[GreatBunzinni (642500)]

If you really had read the article then you would understand that the relation between this project and the US military is not a "paragraph out of context". The article states not only that the US defence department studied this option in the past but scrapped it for being too expensive, which nowadays, with all the developments on solar technology and materials, it is clearly not. Moreover, it also states, and you've seen to missed it, that this particular project has the US military as "an influential bac

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[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Well, if by "rich weirdo" you mean a certain transplanted Texas cowboy, you could be right. Fortunately he'll be gone soon. I hope.

Somewhat more seriously, the output of a power system like this would have to be fairly diffuse, to maintain a low enough energy density not to be dangerous to living tissue. Granted, what might not be dangerous to humans or larger animals might have deleterious effects on smaller organisms. From that perspective, a mid-ocean setting makes a good choice for a trial. Not that

urban re-design and development

[User 956 (568564)]

The island nation of Palau is looking into creating a satellite-to-ground power transmission system.

I'm sure the US Army already has such a thing, although they probably plan on using it to make glass parking lots.

SimCity

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves (236787)]

Anyone else just flash on an image of a beam from space getting misaligned with the receiver and vaporizing sections of your city?

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[Mister Transistor (259842)]

Yeah, nothing could possibly go wrong with that...

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[mikesd81 (518581)]

I was thinking more like the movie Under Siege 2 where he blows the stealth out of the sky....

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[wizardforce (1005805)]

explosions aren't the problem with this power level, inducing currents in conductive materials like say electronics is. more powerful versions with a tighter beam may be able to do physical damage rather than electronuc damage but they are likely a few years off.

Re:SimCity

[rickwood (450707)]

One solution is to power the satellite with a return beam from the Earth station. If the main beam wanders, it loses power and cuts off. There are other solutions [wikipedia.org].

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[mcpkaaos (449561)]

No, but I have a sudden urge to eat popcorn.

Asimov

[radius1214 (1082581)]

Isaac Asimov wrote about a power source like this in "I, Robot." There were stations in space that absorbed solar energy and transmitted it back to Earth. If the ray became out of align, or if a magnetic storm intercepted the ray on its way toward the receptacle on the ground, it would distort the energy causing severe damage to huge portions of the planet. In the case of Palau, if they can get this technology working properly, it would be interesting to see how the United States or the EU would use this to aid their combat against global warming and non-renewable energy. Maybe the Space Station will get equipped with a huge solar array to send renewable energy down to Earth, eh?

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[mikesd81 (518581)]

Eh, I'm not sure I'd put that on the space station. I'm not sure I'd put the transmitter on anything that includes human life. It could be serviceable by ISS personnel, but it should be it's own satellite being in case anything happens....like an overload. I'm still interested on exactly how the energy will be beamed down to Earth safely. And of course if someone accidentally looks at it, will they go blind?

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[ShakaUVM (157947)]

My AP Bio teacher back in the day talked about this technology being about the worst thing possible for global warming, as it actually increases the amount of energy coming in to the Earth. Even oil just burns energy that was stored as organic matter ages ago.

Nuclear is still the best way to deal with global warming.

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[Xaositecte (897197)]

The idea behind global warming is the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which traps existing energy rather than allowing it to escape out into space. If the decrease in emissions allows more energy to escape than is being introduced into the system, you have a net benefit as far as global warming is concerned.

Secondly, if you produce energy through Solar power like this that you otherwise would have produced using oil, you aren't producing a net increase in energy. The oil is still stored the

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

Asimov, although a legend in his own time, probably shouldn't be your primary source of scientific knowledge now, or in the future.

You're kidding yourself..

[hax0r_this (1073148)]

If you think the US would use this to combat global warming. More like use it to combat "terrorists".

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[PhotoGuy (189467)]

Isaac Asimov wrote about a power source like this in "I, Robot." There were stations in space that absorbed solar energy and transmitted it back to Earth. If the ray became out of align, or if a magnetic storm intercepted the ray on its way toward the receptacle on the ground, it would distort the energy causing severe damage to huge portions of the planet.

I'm sure this type of problem is addressd in the core design of the system. As a simple parallel: I had two way satellite internet, which involves Joe S

Prediction

[Dr. Cody (554864)]

Time will tell us "no" in a stern voice.

What kind of boondoggle is this?

[SKorvus (685199)]

They're paying $800 per watt, when a company is now shipping solar panels that cost under $1/watt [nanosolar.com], AND have a single, expensive point of failure? What is the point of beaming solar energy down from space, to a tropical island?

Ground-based solar including panels and batteries could be built local to each home or village, at a fraction of the cost of this over-engineered idea.

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[sokoban (142301)]

Ground-based solar including panels and batteries could be built local to each home or village, at a fraction of the cost of this over-engineered idea.

Maybe they have higher power requirements than there is area available for solar panels. They are an island after all. Space is kind of limited.

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[Tablizer (95088)]

They're paying $800 per watt, when a company is now shipping solar panels that cost under $1/watt

Uh.....unions?

     

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[the grace of R'hllor (530051)]

1) It's a testbed. The technology is new. Prices will fall if it's successful. If it weren't expensive to try, we'd be having this already.
2) They're in the tropics. Frequent rains will not only disturb solar collection, it will likely cause excessive required maintenance on the panels.
3) It's a frigging island. Construction-space is limited. Putting the solar array in orbit means you have *oodles* of space (no pun) for solar panels, many times greater than what you could get on any island. Also, no clouds,

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[Colin Smith (2679)]

Yeah, but you're missing the point. They'll be in debt for 2000 years so the banks will be happy, the people will be able to beam with pride at how technologically advanced they are and the government get to look like they're important.
 

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[BlueParrot (965239)]

when a company is now shipping solar panels that cost under $1/watt

No they don't, the $1/W price is what they hope getting the price down to with time. Or put in a slightly different way $1/W is a press release from their marketing department which doesn't accurately specify under what conditions it applies.

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[Tablizer (95088)]

It's for my science project!

I can find you a better way to kill an ant than a giant space laser.
     

considering global warming + small island nations

[circletimessquare (444983)]

the side bonus to this system is that palau can widen the aperture and fuzzy the focus on the satellite, to the "ablate" setting, and burn off the ocean water encroaching on the last bit of high ground on the atoll

Reason

[faragon (789704)]

I hope they will find some loyal robot Descartes!

We really do not need this stuff

[Kupfernigk (1190345)]

It's already been pointed out that once solar cells are properly commercialised - and this is rapidly getting closer - the entire United States generation baseload could be provided from panels on public land in Arizona alone. Anybody who has been following recent trends in power generation will see that there are basically four threads which are coming together quite fast; solar, wind, nuclear and thermonuclear (i.e. the Toshiba proposal for small inherently safe reactors that could be mainly used for area

Long, uphill climb

[Stuntmonkey (557875)]

Hmmm, 1MW for $0.8B, that's $800/Watt. About 800x the cost of coal, and 200x the cost of old-school photovoltaics. That's quite a lot of ground to make up, especially given that presumably the largest component of expense -- launch costs -- have a very low likelihood of improving by this factor until something like the space elevator comes along.

This story seems like a hoax. The nation of Palau has only 20,000 people, and a annual GDP of $160M. Are they really going to invest in a single R&D proje

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[wizardforce (1005805)]

This story seems like a hoax. The nation of Palau has only 20,000 people, and a annual GDP of $160M. Are they really going to invest in a single R&D project that costs five times their national GDP? I call BS.

they probably are not paying for it themselves, it sounds like an experimental project funded from off the island with significantly more investment money available than that whole island is worth.

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[ceoyoyo (59147)]

Read the article. The Pentagon wants to put a megawatt solar panel on a LEO satellite to beam power down to the ground on a deserted tropical island. It's a test bed for the technology. Might that technology have some interesting uses, uses that might seem to be an awfully good deal for only a billion dollars?

tatoo: "the math, the math"

[Tablizer (95088)]

I don't get how satellites can be cheaper than simply setting up bunches of solar panels on the ground. Putting poundage into space and managing it is damned expensive, let alone the precision aiming technology. I don't get the accounting here. Please help me, I'm a doctor, not an accountant (well ok, I'm not actually a doc, but it makes a better cliche).

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[xenocide2 (231786)]

There was a google tech talk on orbital power [google.com] I just saw yesterday on the subject. The basic idea is preparing for a global power system based on renewable energy. Their argument is that power generation from light at the surface is inefficient because the atmosphere is not transparent on most of the sun's spectrum (I guess this means the "visible spectrum" is evolved from this atmosphereic property). In contrast, there's much more light to be had in space. I guess they believe that aiming it can be done.

Th

This is what happens when

[Tablizer (95088)]

...the natives believe their spam.

There are side benefits

[edwardpickman (965122)]

All the cooked birds you can eat.

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[pimpimpim (811140)]

Plus, with correctly placed mirrors, you can use it to roast enemies at neighboring islands!

Same sized receiver?

[Tablizer (95088)]

Article: One NASA study visualized solar-panel arrays 3 by 6 miles in size, transmitting power to similarly sized rectennas on Earth.

1. That could glow pretty bright in the night sky. Environmentalists may complain.

2. So much for real-estate savings.

3. How the hell did the name "rectenna" get past the marketing department? Must be from the Uranus Ad Agency.
   

Beat the waves

[complex(179,-70) (1101799)]

I can already see a great TV reality show. "Beat the Waves", where contestants have 90 minutes to cross the island, preferably while trying to slow down the others in any way possible. Beer and chips ready, GO.

what?

[sentientbrendan (316150)]

so their plan is to put a solar panel in space... because solar radiation is 8 times more powerful... umm... I'm pretty sure that putting the same surface area of solar panels in space is going to cost *way* more than 8 times as much as putting it on the ground.

Then of course there's the idea that we will somehow magically "beam" the energy to the ground. Here's an idea, we let the sunlight beam itself to the ground, instead of putting an enormous expensive satellite as an unnecessary intermediary in the process.

This is one of the sci fi ideas that sounds cool in a story because it involves big machines and lasers, but is totally nonsensical when you actually take ten seconds to think about it. File this in the same category as giant fighting robots and transporter beams.

let's do the math

[Ancient_Hacker (751168)]

Kinda silly, but let's do the math. We will assume you can build and loft the required equipment for the stated price. A satellite at 300 miles up is going to be overhead for maybe 10 minutes. Let's assume as in TFA it will send down a megawatt during that time. So on the average it's beaming down 166 kilowatts. A kilowatt-hour might cost as much as 20 cents on an island, so this satellite gives them about $34 per hour.

Now if they went to the UN Bank to borrow the $800 million, they might get an interest rate of 8%. The first year, the interest cost alone is $64 million. The satellite has beamed back 24 * 366 * $34 or a tad under $300,000. This plan can't pay back even 1/200th of the cost of money.

Interim Assessment of Space Solar Power...

[mikelieman (35628)]

http://spacesolarpower.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/final-sbsp-interim-assessment-release-01.pdf [wordpress.com]

Long story short, if we get off our asses, in 50 years we can have energy independence, AND cheap access to space.

Simplified description

[DerekLyons (302214)]

There isn't space in a Slashdot comment box to describe the many things wrong with this proposal, so I'll sum up:
 
If the new snake oil powered launchers come online on schedule, and the unobtanium mines in Siberia don't have a another bad winter - this proposal has abour .01% of a chance in hell of meeting the costs and schedules laid out in the article. (Though I suspect the high worldwide demand for handwavium integrated circuits, needed for aiming the satellite's antenna, may be the bottleneck in the end.)

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[muffel (42979)]

From TFA: "...that Palau's uninhabited Helen Island would be an ideal spot for a small demonstration project"

So, no, we obviously didn't run out of them.