Deinonychus antirrhopus

Steve-

Also remember that the Middle Eastern counries have lower lifting costs than any other region, so their oil is the least expensive to produce on a relative basis. Declining to purchase Middle Eastern oil would not be cost-effective for the US unless we eliminated all domestic production with a higher marginal lifting cost, which is basically all US domestic consumption.

I meant "countries" at the beginning of my comment and "US domestic production" not "consumption" at the end.

Isn't the price of oil determined by the global market, so even if every drop comes from Oklahoma and Texas, the price is still determined in the Middle East? In short, it's *impossible* to be "free and independent of Middle East oil".

...the price is still determined in the Middle East?

That sounds wrong to me. The price would be determined by the market. If every drop of oil the world ever bought came from inside the U.S., the price would be market-determined just as it is now. The Middle East simply (periodically) attempts to apply price controls through collusion. It doesn't always work, but they try to do it anyway.

Interesting how Kerry is not pointing out the positive effects of an increase in the gas tax, i.e. the environmental benefits of reduced gasoline consumption. I guess the environmentalist agenda is sunk if this basic point cannot be made without fear of the consequences.

Hey, if someone could make a case for a cost-effective way to convert solar radiant power to something useful on a large scale (for instance, a solar-collector farm at the Earth-Moon L5 point, or the like), I'd line up behind it. Solar-power shingles? Sure, when the price comes down. Right now, they're WAY more expensive than the alternative; I calculated the cost-recovery period to be in excess of 10 years. More efficient light bulbs? Look, we've had fluorescents out for quite a long time, and compact fluorescents have been on the market a few years. How many people who're screaming about foreign oil dependency are actually using them?

There's a few ways to reduce dependency on foreign oil that may actually work: increase usage efficiency, reduce cost of supplemental power, and nuclear power for everyone.

Slartibartfast,

Hey, if someone could make a case for a cost-effective way to convert solar radiant power to something useful on a large scale (for instance, a solar-collector farm at the Earth-Moon L5 point, or the like), I'd line up behind it.

Not L-5, but geostationary orbit, for the Solar Power Satellite (SPS) would need to stay in orbit in order to beam the energy to fixed rectennas on the Earth. L-5 has unique orbital characteristics that are useful in the construction of the SPS but not for its implementation.

Alas, SPS is technically the ideal replacement candidate that best addresses sustainable and ever expanding energy consumption and doesn't require a curtailment of an energy intensive lifestyle (so luddite watermelons will definitely be against it) but it faces the classic chicken-egg conundrum - without orbital infrastructure it is economically and physically impractical to build - but if the infrastructure doesn't have to be borne by SPS and SPS is costed without attributing the entire fixed cost of ancillary industries then its power can be sold for less than any contempory source today.

Imagine having to develop an iron and coal mining industry, shipbuilding, agriculture, hospitals, etc in order to get to the point of drilling your first oil well. SPS construction would take place in barren space. SPS would have to pay for everything needed in order to get to the point of concentrating on core competence. Follow-on industries, if any, wouldn't have to develop space fuel refining, crew quarters, metal refining, in order to launch their ventures.

SPS, and its precedent - orbital development, are extremely interesting economic questions for they require building an orbital economy from nothing. The economic interdependencies that we take for granted simply don't exist. Imagine if Intel had to own and develop the whole supply and material chain in order to build chips.

I was going to put up a response to Steve's point that highlighted the many subsidies that oil now receives but you just happened to point to a topic that I've been studying for decades.

Just to clarify, I'm not at odds with Steve's position, just that he needs to recognize the legislative, military and economic subsidies that the oil economy receives that are not reflected in the market price of oil.

If you want to know more about the technical superiority of SPS over alternative energy strategies let me know - I can lay it out for you from the ground up.

As for Kerry's energy policy, it is clearly designed to appeal to the environmentally chic subset of the electorate who don't realize that their ideology is technically and economically limited and quite hollow. Their road will not lead us to salvation, only to ruin, for it would involve subsidizing feel-good platitudes that are technically inferior to oil.

We need ever expanding amounts of energy, especially now with the rise of China and India. Oil has finite limits. As it's price rises, as Steve pointed out earlier, alternatives will be sought. The problem is that oil has an existing infrastructure base and alternatives do not (completely leaving aside that all of the alternatives, except for nuclear, have a energy density shortfall.) So as the price of oil rises the switch to alternatives may not follow classic market principles because of the heavy upfront costs, so we'll be stuck will oil even as it's marginal price per joule rises above alternatives because we'll have invested so much into sunk assets.

Kerry is blowing hot-air just like Bush did with his support for the Hydrogen Economy. All image and no substance.

TangoMan, I didn't rule out the existence of a relay station at geostationary. And I didn't presume a method whereby stored power is transmitted to Earth, either. Any Earth-based microwave (for instance) antenna reception farm would have to be fairly large in order to avoid fatally high power densities. Even with umpteen levels of safety, people are going to balk if power densities are anough to slow-cook them, should the beam-steering go astray.

Plus geostationary is going to involve a certain number of hours of shadow per day, to some extent or other, that would be present in L5 to a lesser extent. I'm not sure whether L5's stability would be sufficient to retain something like SPS, given the solar wind pressure. That's yet another thing I've not looked into.

I actually haven't given the whole issue all that much thought, but if it's solar power you want, you might as well avoid the whole diurnal issue and go into space. Where's best for that is less important than other logistics, at present. Like: how are you going to get possibly a few square kilometers of silicon into geosynch or higher?

Slartibartfast, Sorry. I didn't know if you only had a passing familiarity with the concept or not. Clearly you're up on the technical details.

If you locate at L-5, then you're fairly stable, seeing how L-5 is a bowl shaped gravitional region. However, because L-4 and L-5 are leading and trailing the moon 60 degrees in its orbit, if you want to avoid placing the SPS in GEO, then you might want to look at Criswell's plan for lunar basing. Personally, I think his plan falters compared to the Glaser/O'Neill vision.

As for the power outage issue, I'm relying on memory here, I believe the SPS has a 99% up-time and would be eclipsed for a few minutes at local midnight. In-orbit power beaming could address this issue.

Power density is 1/2 of sunlight, but is available around the clock, day-or-night, is not blocked by clouds, doesn't have the horrendous conversion inefficiencies of solar photovoltaic or thermal, and the rectenna grounds would consist of dipoles thus allowing dual use for the land. Underneath the dipoles one could raise livestock or perform agriculture.

In terms of beam steering, a seperate coordination beam is sent up to the SPS to perform alignment. The power density of the beam will fall off quite dramatically as we move away from the center of the beam and would be background noise a few hundred meters beyond the rectenna boundary. In terms of energy flux reaching the ground, the additional energy of the beam, being 1/2 of sunlight, wouldn't have a too noticable environmental impact considering that there are regions of the Earth with higher solar densities and this is a worst case scenario which assumes the beam would go off track, not be corrected by the guide beam, not be diffused, etc.

Beam misalignment is a favorite scare tactic, much like we should expect to see in a Sci-Fi movie, or in SimCity.

As for the material needed for construction - well, it sure isn't going to be launched. That will never make economic sense, so it's DOA. The lynchpin to such a proposal is the amortization of orbital infrastructure over a large base of installed generating capacity. Unfortunately, there is no way to develop this incrementally in an economically self-supporting fashion.

We're pissing away billions on ISS and Mars plans etc, as well as space science when we should be building common use infrastructure in orbit that can lay the foundation for ancillary economic development. Highways, seaports, airports, electrical grids, canals, etc allow diverse economic activity to develop. We should be doing the same in orbit in order to lower LEO access costs and developing a bootstrap process to get us further out of the gravity well.

I just read an abstract that makes an argument for an array at the Earth/Sun L2 point. Or, rather, in a loose orbit about that point, to avoid shading.

Whatever the concept, I think we'd need to demonstrate (first on paper, then in place) that the hardware can survive long enough to make doing it worthwhile. Most electronics has a tough time under solar radiation, and I'm more than a little curious to see whether photovoltaic cells can survive for years under the rain of particles and photons.

And then there's the larger particles, such as dust moving at tens of kilometers per second. Sooner or later, anything we put out there is going to be entirely disabled by such bombardment, and we'd need to understand what sort of lifetime to expect.

Slarti, Yes I see you're up on the literature. Dr. Landis is a smart guy and makes a good case. I buy his argument that ground solar is a compliment to SPS but feel that his L-2 siting is more illustrative of gee-whiz factors than practicality.

The power interruption from GEO eclipsing would last from 10-20 minutes. To avoid this power interruption by locating at L-2 would present a whole slew of new problems. It is simpler to invest in power storage systems that discharge their power over a 10-30 minute period and then take the other 23.5 hours to recharge.

Also, with GEO location, we could allow generating plants in Buffalo to beam their baseload output to orbit and back down to Singapore. This helps level out the capacity problem in generation facilities.

Don't necessarily equate SPS with photovoltaics. Woodcock's proposal was based on solar-thermal. In terms of generating capacity per unit-mass and longevity of the majority of the structure, thermal beats photovoltaics, however it has more points of failure because of machinary involved. Pros & cons.

As I'm sure you're aware most of the electronics that goes to GEO has to pass through the VA belts. Such passage complicates the analysis. In terms of vulnerable SPS electronics, keep in mind that the entire bulk of the SPS is not laden with electronics. This looks like a design optimization issue - fairly standard. Also, operating in a vacuum the klystrons could be of fairly simple design. The power beaming apparatus and controls will be most vulnerable to radiation issues however they are concentrated and this affords the opportunity for radiation amelioration measures.

The great expense of a SPS is the platform. After a number of decades of use, assuming PV, the SPS could go through a refit involving annealing the PVs. This is no different than regular maintenance at generating plants. For a thermal SPS, the sterling/brayton could be replaced or retrofitted.

Again, SPS is not economically efficient as a piece-meal solution because of amortization issues. If you look at it as an oil-replacement technology, then there is sufficient scale involved to warrant the massive infrastructure that would be required in orbit to enable SPS construction. Abundant supply of electricity allows other Earth-based problems to be solved, such as de-salinating water for Los Angeles and Las Vegas, electrolysizing water to provide the backbone for hydrogen fuel cells (rather than using natural gas as the feedstock.) Lastly, it allows us to use energy in continuing abundance rather than rationing it and adopting the Green lifestyle of energy deprivation and raping the Earth to mine the materials for windpower and creating an unsightly mess of windfarms.

Yeah, I was thinking solar-thermal might help solve the problem with PV. I think PV will tend to degrade in performance over time, where solar-thermal would probably be less sensitive.

The GEO-shade time doesn't compute, though. geostationary orbit is about 22k miles (IIRC) and the diameter of the earth is about 8k miles, which means the earth subtends about twenty degrees of sky. Sure, there's a bit of penumbra, but you've got to anticipate a couple of hours of substantial outage per day, worst case. Sure, the worst case only happens a couple of times per year, but on average you've got to count on an hour per day.

In case it's not clear, I'm entirely in support of efforts in this direction, provided they're properly thought out in advance.

I was too quick with my response. The eclipse factor is more fully described by Henry Spencer in this post, by Seth Potter in this post, and in this excerpt from a comprehensive SPS study.

"That sounds wrong to me. The price would be determined by the market. If every drop of oil the world ever bought came from inside the U.S., the price would be market-determined just as it is now. The Middle East simply (periodically) attempts to apply price controls through collusion. It doesn't always work, but they try to do it anyway."

Sorry, I used a little shorthand because I was in a hurry. The Middle East - specifically, Saudi Arabia - determines the price of oil, because the Saudis are the "swing producer". As the only nation with much spare production capacity available, they can raise production to moderate price spikes if they so choose (and as they have done in the past). Or not, as is the case right now. So, yeah, the "market" determines prices, but the Saudis have a significant capability to influence that market. Take a look at the May 29th Economist, pp. 69-70.

Fools! Haliburton is in Iraq. We can take their oil any time we want now.

Interesting how Kerry is not pointing out the positive effects of an increase in the gas tax, i.e. the environmental benefits of reduced gasoline consumption. I guess the environmentalist agenda is sunk if this basic point cannot be made without fear of the consequences.

To some on the left, high gasoline prices are only good if they are caused by exorbitant taxes.

Ah, I did screw up. I was comparing the 20 degree whole angle of the Earth's obscuration disk with the 23 degree inclination of the earth's axis, and finding obscuration over much of the year. I ought to have known better. Ok, so the obscuration bit is probably down in the noise level, as issues go.

Okay, I find all of this horribly interesting. But I don't agree with the initial post.
That said, TangoMan, I'd definately like to take you up on your offer for a explaination. I just graduated undergrad (physics) and have two more years of grad school to determine a specialty, so any info you have would be appreciated.

Kerry sucks - period.