Beamed Power

>
>>Anyway, check out how much it costs to move a fuel gallons of
>>GAS around. It's down in the cents region. Now work out the costs
>>for building a microwave power transmitter/receiver.
>>
> GAS fuel is useless to an electricity consumer if there is no power
> station in the market, e.g. California. The electrcicity cost there
> is dominated by the cost of financing power stations and power
> transmission.

Yeah? And? These power stations aren't THAT expensive. Few tens of
millions or so. Maybe one hundred million.

>>Right now, for just about any scenario you can imagine, there are
>>cheaper ways of DISTRIBUTING power than building a GEO relay. It
>>doesn't matter how it scales if it's sufficiently expensive in the
>>first place.
>>
> Again, where are the numbers ? How big is the gap ?

Why do I have to do all your numbers for you? Shouldn't you
do that bearing in mind you're making the claim that it makes
sense?

Oh, well, lets assume an arbitrary 1kg/m^2. Sounds in the ballpark
(that would make it less than 1mm thick, but in space that's probably
not totally out of the question.) Cost to GEO is about ~$10000 per kg.

You need atleast 1km^2, that's 1 million m^2.

Therefore one GEO transmitter would cost atleast 10 billion.

You may need two in fact, one for receive, one for transmit. That
makes 20 billion. On top of that you need to stick some equipment
on the ground to receive the microwaves and distribute it. On top
of that are the development costs.

This for about a megawatt. i.e. not very much power

>>For most normal sitations, the antennas are 10s or hundred of meters
>>
> Please define "normal" situation, I am not surwe what you are referring
> to.

Like when you need to transmit more than tens of kilometers. Try looking
at the equations sometime.

> Luna is a good place to solar cells for an SPS, but the antennas and
> microwave components weigh a lot less, are more difficult to manufacture
> and could be better sent up from Earth.

Certainly not in the long run. In the short run definitely, but then
it's expensive.

> So we agree that the safety risk from SPS sized microwave beams is
> non-existent.

No.

> Do you think we can sell this as safe to the genral public ?

Yes.

> CR.

civilization?"