How many SPSes for $87 billion ?

Thanks for the detailed reply.

>> 1. Putting a nation's energy supply in orbit just puts the nation
>> at risk of space habitat originated cartels and embargoes instead
>> of earthly oil producer cartels and embargoes
> Are you the victim of a TV set cartel? There are no domestic
> manufacturers yet we seem to be able to purchase sets more cheaply
> than in the past. SPS is an asset in the same manner. Oil, OTOH is a
> consumable quantity that is subject to market forces on a daily
> basis.

TV sets last for many years, and also are a luxury more than a neccesity
for the consumer. Much of energy use is not a luxury given the current
US lifestyle -- without it, people freeze, ambulances can't get people
to hospitals, food is not delivered, water isn;t pumped, etc. Thus a TV
set embargo is not an appropriate analogy. A better analogy would be a
country like Singapore getting most of its drinking water from another
country. Is not such a situation a security concern?

Who is going to run say 100 SPSs in orbit? Perhaps the Habitat Power
Authority? And then you have a single point of failure if this Authority
goes rogue relative to the nation using the power.

There are other security issues as well -- a few missiles or saboteurs
and the entire SPS system can be taken out in one day. Right now the US
is in a panic over intelligence relating to terrorists planning
something like cargo airplane attacks on conventional nuclear plants
(and historically, as far back as the 1970s, one reason people opposed
building centralized nukes was the risk of terrorist attacks on them --
too bad Power interests overruled these grassroots concerns back then).

Centralization of an important activity like energy production to create
single points of failure makes a brittle energy supply system and that
is simply bad security policy. We currently have such a brittle system
-- see the book Brittle Power (the point of the title)
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/art7095.php
and have had such a brittle power for decades (e.g. the few oil and gas
pipelines in the US are very vulnerable according to that book) -- but
that does not change the fact that centralization of power production
from a security standpoint has been, and still is, a bad idea from a
national or personal security standpoint. It also doesn't change the
fact that centralizing anything in a big way also is in a sense
undemocratic and a threat to personal liberties because defending that
single point of failure (big nukes, SPSs, oil pipe lines, etc.) against
the bogeyman of the moment then justifies any sort of curtailment of
civil liberties (e.g. a "defense energy assurance act" which allows
preventive arrests for people who discuss or might discuss energy
vulnerability issues in public, etc.). So, an SPS future, absent a
radical shift in politics (such as benevolent world government or
non-government like in John Lennon's song "Imagine") would be a
political disaster used to justify fascism (not that fascism could
protect SPSs, any more than the US occupation in Iraq can stop attacks
there on pipelines and power grids, just that it would be argued by
Power propaganda that more fascism is a good idea for such times).

>> 2. Economically speaking, energy efficiency is a much better
>> economic investment than energy production.

> Here is my anecdotal rebuttal. Back in the late 70s, early 80s, I was
> a partner in a home insulation business. When we started, things
> were going gangbusters, but after a few years, our telephone
> solicters increasingly ran into more and more people who had already
> had their homes insulated. IOW, our retrofit market was finite and
> the more successul we were the faster we eroded the marketplace. I
> learned a very important lesson from that venture and it did help
> finance grad school.
>
> The claim of insulation leading to energy independence is clearly
> overstated.

First off, laws and tax credits have gone backwards in many cases since
that time (with the start of the Reagan years). Also, many such
insulation jobs (not saying anything personal) were poorly done by fly
by night outfits. So were many attempts at passive solar architecture
(too many windows, not enough vapor barriers, etc.) -- according to the
Passive Solar Architect who designed much of the house we live in.
Technology has also improved over the last twenty years. So, Passive
Solar is maybe a new business opportunity again someday?
http://jl-company.com/Research/PassiveSolar.html

I don't feel the issue is overstated (although numbers may shift over
time). For a well insulated (R60+) home, with proper passive solar
design the air conditioning and heating needs are much lower, and in the
case of heating can be typically supplied almost entirely by body heat
and electricity used in the home for appliance, computers, etc. Pretty
much eight months of the year our home needs no supplemental heating and
cooling. In the last winter (-20F typically, we live in the Adirondack
Park) we did use supplemental heating for about four months -- but our
home is a retrofit in a very cold area, and has some large north side
glass windows for a view (which are not especially well insulated), and
has some other energy leak issues that need updating. In any case, we
use elctric heat and our eletric bills are still about the same as our
neighbors who needs to keep a wood stove going. The addition of
exterior automatic thermal shutters for night time use would probably
reduce much of that bill. I would like to install an air-to-air heat
exchanger to reduce our window opening for occasional ventilation and
running indoor air filters (we have dogs producing hair and dander). So,
still things to do -- but note that with government incentives to do
these things, in the interests of security, they might get done faster.
Also note that air-to-air heat exchanges are simpler than air
conditioners yet cost 4X or more as much, don't come in convenient
window mount types typically, and thermal shutter prices seem way more
expensive than they need be. So, these are consequence of the rarity of
such efficiency improvements in the US.

For cities, simple things like painting roofs white can reduce energy
consumption. So can laws promoting more work from home to avoid
commuting costs etc.

> You leave out economic considerations, convenience and the market
> preferences of the consumers.

I'll agree with this -- however, it's interesting that people are
willing to support invading other countries rather than considering
saving money long term by energy efficiency. Yes, this is a cultural
problem -- the product of essentially a cult of imperialism stretching
back centuries. Making others suffer in a big way to avoid making
relatively minor policy changes related to energy efficiency is
uncivilized. Se below comments on bicycling. The US populaton seems far
more ready to contemplate armegeddon than either voluntary simplicity or
efficiency.

> For that matter, we could all use wood burning stoves and forget
> about oil heating our houses. It's only an environmental-air
> pollution problem, not a technical one. Think of all those forests
> that we can harvest - they're renewable - if only we could see
> through the smog to be able to cut down the trees.

No, because there probably is not enough available timber on a
sustainable basis given that most of the heat value in inefficient wood
stoves will be going up the chimney or out leaky doors and windows etc.
If you are talking efficient conversion of biomass to hydrogen coupled
with well built energy efficient homes, then maybe there is the
beginning of something there.

Note that my argument isn't that one energy source is enough (although
PV&Wind probably is). It is that by using energy more efficiently (thus
cutting consumption by half or even 9/10 while saving money) the energy
needs of the USA can be reduced to a point where renewables can easily
supply it.

Remember, between mining pits, safety zones around conveniontal big
nukes, utility right of ways lines, something like 1% of the US land
surface area is already devoted to energy production -- a surface area
ample for PV power production to meet all the US's energy needs if the
energy is used efficiently (including dealing with transportation issues
much more efficiently -- the hardest part). But even if I am widely off,
the US currently can supply something like 1/3 of its own energy from
fossil fuels from within its borders -- so energy efficiency and
renewable plus fossil fuels provides an immediate alternative to foreign
conquest and occupation for natural resource handling profits like in
Iraq. But of course, wars like Vietnam and Iraq are more about Power
(big P) than power (little P).

> For a PARTIAL explanation of this look to the addendum I attached to
> my previous post that addressed the larger distances between US
> metropolitan centers comapred to European centers. There are other
> factors at work as well, but that shouldn't completely diminish your
> point that there are inefficiencies in the US infrastructure.
>

I will agree that the US has built itself into a corner regarding
energy efficiency related to the automobile lifestyle and sprawl
(including by the ripping out light rail transit systems in the 1930s
done by tire and oil companies) despite warnings -- this will take quite
a while to resolve optimally.

The US is so backward it is not even safe to ride a
bicycle in most cases because of the risk of accidents by automobile
users. A recent clear channel radio broadcast actually promoted
automobile users running cyclists of the road and throwing things at them
-- just shows how far in the opposite direction the US has gone.
Contrast this with a country like the Netherlands with bicycle lanes
(and sidewalks) just about everywhere.

From the above link:
"Cyclists across the nation have reacted with furor to reports, widely
disseminated on the Internet, that a Raleigh, NC radio station (G105)
owned by Clear Channel Communications recently advocated violence
against cyclists, including suggestions of how to run cyclists off the
road. On two morning shows last week, the disc jockeys encouraged
listeners to call in with stories of how they had harassed cyclists,
whom they felt should not be on the road.One host joked of pelting
cyclists with empty Yoo-Hoo bottles. Calls came in from listeners who
agreed with him, and said that they would take similar action. A
show intern discussed a man in her neighborhood who shoots a pellet gun
at cyclists as they ride by his house, attempting to hit their tires to
make them crash. According to a listener quoted in the October 1
Raleigh News Observer, "One caller said her dad had purposely hit a
biker on the road on the way to church one Sunday and kept on going.
That got laughs. Bob (one of the hosts) thought that was funny."

So, this is the emotional and legal and infrastructure pit the US people
have dug for themselves and which they need to crawl out of. Yes,
perhaps irradiating other countries with DU etc. does seem easier than
dealing with such a moral quagmire at home. But the US energy policy is
still morally wrong and lazy -- and the US population will inevitably
suffer for this unless there continues to be a change in perspective
(which is happening, it slowly). The issue is simply that the general US
population pays the costs, while a Power elite gets the benefits of this
lazy and morally bankrupt energy and conquest policy.

> Economically and practically it makes sense to
> stop wasting energy before producing more of it.
>
> I disagree. Philosophically you raise a point of view. Economically,
> the markets decide, and the markets are choosing the route of cheap
> consumables over asset intensive mitagation.

Conventional response, but incomplete. The markets are not pricing the
external costs like military subsidies, health consequences (like
breathing radioactives from coal plant exhaust), environmental
degradation etc. which make the current means of energy production many
times more costly than what the market sees. Also, the market has heavy
intervention by a tax code promoting energy and resource waste (by
lobbying from vested interests). Thus, from a moral or sustainable point
of view, the market is producing insane activities. Any decent economist
will essentially admit that markets only optimize based on market
visible costs. Of course your answer could be to privatize the
envirornment etc. and have lawsuits etc. but in practice that
essentially means only the wealthy will have guaranteed clean air and
water and access to less-spoiled nature. A better answer might be to try
to change some of the underlying tax codes and legal codes so the market
sees these external costs and there is a level playing field for renewables.

The bottom line is that if there is a nuclear war etc. over oil
resources, or just continued biosphere pollution until systemic
ecosystem failure of human life support, the market is over. The market
could care less if it expires -- since it is not an evolved sentient
organism. Yet, every step to such of a disaster makes economic sense to
the market... So, this means the market control system must be flawed
from a human survival perspective. Either it needs to be replaced (e.g.
by Star Trek nanotech replicators + PV which eliminate much of the
market for essentials) or it needs to be adjusted by laws related to
justice and survival.

>> And once less energy is used, many on Earth renewable solutions
>> are viable to produce minimal energy needs using local resources
>> (sun, wind, hydro, tidal, biomass, geothermal, etc.).
>
> The sources you mention above are insufficient in scale or robustness
> to offset the current infrastructure.

I am talking about an improved infrastructure.

Even if I wasn't, based on the scale of current land use, we could
probably do it all now with renewable, especially using hydrogen or
other artificially produced liquid fuels (e.g your human waster example)
as an energy storage and transfer media.

A related article on Hydrogen:
http://www.jxj.com/magsandj/rew/2001_04/routes_to_a_hydrogen_economy.html

Something else I wrote on this topic of energy use:
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0008.html

> I disagree. If not for SPS, I see no rationale for Habitat
> construction.

So you're in this just for the money? :-)
I doubt that. Perhaps you mean, "If not for SPS, I see no [economic]
rationale for Habitat construction."

So then why was, say, the city of Boston built? Why do people build
second homes on the water? I think it is valid to say people will build
habitats as places to live -- as new cities -- in the long term just
because they want to. We may just have to disagree on this, but if SPSs
make no economic sense (and I believe they don't) then you are (if I am
right) saying we will never have habitats. That is a sad thought.

> You can repeat your assertions as many times as you like, but absent
> supportinig argument, which you neglect to provide, your assertions
> are opinion, and IMHO, uninformed opinion.

Try out some of the links, especially Brittle power, RMI, etc.
Much of my knowledge on this topic comes from Amory Lovins' work and
that of related people. See for example:
http://www.futurenet.org/19technology/cashman.htm
"Todays state-of-the-art wind turbines are producing electricity for 4
cents a kilowatt hour before any subsidies. (For comparison, the average
wholesale electricity price in California eighteen months ago was three
cents; a year ago 10 cents; six months ago 31 cents.) Wind power is
immune to erratic fuel prices and is fully competitive today with
electricity from fossil fuels.... Years ago, Buckminster Fuller saw
fossil fuels as the starter motor for the industrial-technological
society. He said it is time to move from the starter motor to the main
engines, which are solar, wind, and ocean energies. By moving to the
hydrogen economy, we will return to making our living within the steady
income energies of nature. If we can shift from the starter motor to the
main engines in time to prevent global warming, we may yet acquire the
wisdom to direct the rest of our technologies towards a more positive
effect on the living world."

> You tout this vision of solar cell independence and premise this
> vision of country estates all having the land available to deploy the
> infrastructure. You neglect to factor in the energy costs requried
> to manufacture the PV cells (which is extensive - where will that
> energy come from? - oil? coal?) - with SPS all the energy used is
> derived away from Earth's biosphere.

First off, there is very little difference between suggesting on earth
PV (or mirror farms focused on boilers) which produces power to make
more generating capacity, and in space PV (or boilers) which is used to
make more energy capacity -- excepted granted there are some orbital
advantages (no sand storms, 100% sunlight all the time) though they are
also offset by some disadvantages (receivers taking a significant land
area, solar storms, current difficulty of remote space operations).

Granted, this is the best case, but see for example:
http://www.awea.org/faq/bal.html
"The energy generated by wind turbines pays for the materials used to
make them in a matter of months, according to three separate European
studies. The question, thought by industry analysts to have been
effectively answered during the 1970s, has been raised anew recently by
some critics of proposed new wind power plants, who have questioned
whether the energy produced by a wind turbine justifies its
construction. The question possibly arises from now-dated findings on
the net energy pay-back of solar photovoltaic cells, according to Jos
Beurskens, manager of renewable energy for the Dutch national energy
research center ECN. Early solar cells had a negative energy balance,
Beurskens said, but more recent products perform far better and pay back
the energy consumed in their manufacture within ten years. As the
performance of photovoltaics improves, so too will their energy balance.
In contrast to photovoltaics, Beurskens said, wind turbines typically
pay for themselves in a matter of months. "

So, even PVs, which last thirty years, so have at least a 3 for one
energy payback. And this will only improve with more production and
better designs. And as the article says, wind turbines pay back all the
energy in the first year. The article includes a chart:
Type of Power Plant / Payback (Months)
Nuclear 0.7
Coal 0.7
Wind @ 7 m/s 2.5 - 7.5
Wind @ 5.5 m/s 3.8 - 11.4
Wind @ 4 m/s 6.3 - 22.7
Photovoltaic:
Monocrystalline @ 1,000 W/m2 87
Monocrystalline @ 2,200 W/m2 44
Multicrystalline @ 1,000 W/m2 85
Multicrystalline @ 2,200 W/m2 43
Amorphous @ 1,000 W/m2 56
Amorphous @ 2,200 W/m2 28

Note that there are other issues to consider as well for payback --
human labor, external costs, scalability, siting, security, waste, etc.

> You also neglect to advance how dense cities can deploy sufficient PV
> arrays to power tall buildings.

Buildings can be redesigned to use less energy (say moving heat around
instead of cooling one side while heating the other using electric
coolers and heater). Semitransparent windows can be layered with PV.
Obviously, cities can have nearby solar and wind and tidal or hydro or
geothermal etc. energy plants as well. They key hear is "nearby". They
can also be part of a grid, but still have local fallback resources for
core operations.

> Further, how about industrial operations?

Electricity and Hydrogen are mainstays of much industrial production,,
and renewables can make these. Recycling carbon and metals can handle
much materials needs.

> How about cloudy days? All those batteries, which have a finite
> chemical lifecycle are going to wreak havoc with the environment.

A mix of PV and wind tends to balance out well -- when it is cloudy for
the PV it is often windy. Hydrogen storage can deal with storage and
transport. As can producing liquid or gas carbon fuels using surplus
electric power. Lead batteries can be pretty much 100% recycled.

>> Frankly, I feel habitats will be built for theses sorts of reasons:
>> * as an act of charity by a philanthropist (not investment as
>> investments are meaningless once there is abundance for all),
>
> You'd probably have a more likely outcome of winning the lotto 5
> times in a row rather than counting on this outcome. First off you'd
> have to have someone accumulate a fortune that is a multiple of what
> Bill Gates has accumulated, and then be willing to bankrupt himself.

FINDS is already supported at a low level by such a philanthropist.

>> * or as a collaborative effort by open source / free content
>> hobbyists (similar to GNU/Linux or model railroad enthusiasts),

> OK, let's be generous, and assume that you have a million enthusiasts
> who can offer their valuable skills. If each of these people
> volunteered $100,000 of their time, you'd still be at only a Hundred
> Billion dollars. How is the actual infrastructure going to be paid
> for?
>
> In short, I don't see this model being applicable.

One hundred billion dollars worth of engineering might be able to design
a ten ton seed which when sent to the moon or the asteroids could
produce habitats. The cost of constructing and launching one such seed
might be less than a billion dollars -- at which point the threshold is
low enough the countries or billionaires might step in.

So consider the situation I propose: Imagine if I had a billion dollars
to spend on Space Habitats (not that I do) and was willing to spend half
on seed construction using an engineering firm and half on launch costs
-- as soon as I am handed a hard disk with all the plans and software to
run the system. The challenge is to produce that hard disk using free
design and simulation labor. I can pretty much gaurantee as a gut
feeling if we had such a hard disk someone would step forward with the
billion.

>> * or through huge government investment as a public works project
>> (or as a justification for continuing a social security pyramid scheme
>> predicated on a growing population),
>
> If the politicians can't make a case for an economic program like
> SPS, then it strectches credulity to believe that they'll fund a
> Habitat which has no economic rationale.

The US military and Japan's roads to nowhere are examples already of
such make work projects. As is historically in the 1930s the US civilian
conservation corps etc. whose roads and buildings are still in use
today. There was also a writers project in the 1930s leading to oral
histories etc. See for example:
http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/porkbarrel_express.htm
http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/magazine/nations/0,8782,98449,00.html
These Japanese projects in the $100s of billions of dollars have no
economic rationales and are funded as pork. Why not space habitats?

>> * and/or by some kid or rogue AI with spare time and a nanotech
>> replicator (in a few decades).
> Might as well say god will make one appear in orbit as salvation for
> those deserving souls.

Realistically, if you look at Moore's law,
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
and Vinge's Singularity,
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html
this one may be the most likely. :-)

> TangoMan

Thanks again for the comments. I may not have time soon to reply much
further right now, but I appreciate the dialogue. Again, I think if you
look into the details, you'll see energy efficiency and renewables are a
surer and safer bet that SPSs for energy security. But long term,
habitats are worthwhile for their own sake -- and because they will
spill innovation back to Earth, just like Boston spills innovations back
on the rest of the US.

--Paul Fernhout