Let's watch this test case

TangoMan-

Once again you have provided a great rebuttal, and I thank you for the
citations. You are indeed marshalling lots of evidence for your points
and bringing in lots of expert opinion. Still, I remain unconvinced.

To begin, let me summarize some problems I have with the overall
argument for SPS over renewables you outline (roughly in decreasing
order of importance):

A. Your arguments sometimes assume a decade or two of R&D for SPS to get
it to work in practice (as opposed to in theory or in small scale
experiment), but you sometimes contrast this future ideal system against
outdated renewable energy facts and figures. Those numbers are perhaps
also spun by experts perhaps with some vested interests in the current
energy system (e.g. at conservative/libertarian Cato). You cite problems
of related older renewable experiments [again possibly inaccurate even
for the time given spin by people with possible vested interests in oil
nukes etc.] to try to discredit renewables. This in some cases pits the
worst or most problematical real-world examples of renewable technology
attempts from twenty or more years ago against the best theoretically
possible SPS technology of twenty or more years in the future. An
example of this is how the PV innovations I cited in the last post (if
they can be put into production) can possibly produce local power for
lower economic costs (fractions of a cent per kWh) in two years than
SPSs can in twenty. (Sorry, can't find my yahoo ID right now to read
your or the other yahoo posts you reference.) While it is true
renewables have had some US government subsidies on the order of
hundreds of millions of dollars total over the past several decades
(even despite Reagan, for example, attacking the US's R&D in this area),
fossil fuels and centralized nukes have had subsidies on the order of
hundreds of billions of dollars total (even trillions if you include
related defense spending) during the same time period in R&D and tax
preferences (thus on the order of >1000X more subsidies), thus
suggesting to me that renewables may improve immensely in efficiency,
cost effectiveness, ease-of-use, and so on once equivalent R&D and tax
breaks are in place for them as the current political Power landscape
continues to slowly change. This makes it very likely IMHO that
renewables will make SPSs obsolete even before SPSs come online given an
expectation of more R&D on PV and other renewables as time goes by
(perhaps mainly outside the US of course).

B. Your arguments sometimes don't consider complete system issues as
regard to environmental impacts of various technologies. You inflate the
importance of pollution from creating solar panels as an overall
percentage of other industrial activities which go on regardless of the
initial energy supply -- while assuming somehow SPS energy use for
industrial production won't have environmental consequences in making
SUVs etc. as far as refining ores to be thrown away or makign plastics
and cumpetrs and so forth. What will PV production realistically be as a
pollution source relative to the baseline pollution of world industrial
pollution? Would it be perhaps 1% more pollution compared to making all
the things PV is used to power (SUVs) or which are consumed (food)? You
disregard as religious (Pagan?) any comments about the continuing impact
of a wasteful mindset polluting the environment needlessly or wasting
energy needlessly which the SPSs vision caters to and which if changed
(such as by convincing people to reduce their broadcast TV viewing :-)
http://adbusters.org/campaigns/tvturnoff/
leads to much easier energy and pollution problems to solve perhaps
without needing SPSs (and perhaps a happier and more joyful life for all
involving less work and more play and deeper caring). Your arguments
also sometimes ignore the immediate environmental benefits of a solution
like PV+Hydrogen+Wind+etc. that can be deployed now or soon as opposed
to twenty years later. Perhaps such solutions might reduce acid rain
sooner, for example which in the Adirondacks costs me real money to pay
for someone else's benefit (in the MidWest?) as I need a ph neutralizer
and related supplies for my water system probably because of their
energy use or industrial production -- an example of how one person's
enrichment may be indirectly causing another person's impoverishment.
The problem with using a lot of energy to make and run toys like SUVs is
when other people have to pay for it in terms of dealing with the
pollution, noise, security ramifications, and so on from both the
construction and operation of those toys. Remember the old adage that
your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Lots of power
from SPSs -- absent rethinking open-cycle polluting means of industrial
pollution -- which would make SPSs part of a way of life seeimngly bent
on destroying the ecosystem faster (and so acid rain might still not
stop as it would be pollution from synfuel production etc. as long as
the mindset of ignoring external costs and pleading poverty of choices
that produces pollution continues). So, SPSs don't really adress the
root cause of human misery or ecosystem destruction (which IMHO is
indeed more cultural (or religious) than anything technical). Yet, if
you assume better means of preventing industrial pollution through
closed-cycle systems in an SPS future, then PV certainly won't be the
environmental horror you make it out to be if produced with those
advanced manufacturing techniques, and PV again becomes as
environmentally friendly an approach as SPS. So, your arguments
typically ignore this system issue and tries to have it both ways on
environmental impact in SPSs' favor.

C. Your arguments sometimes dismiss or ignore what still seem to me to
be obvious security vulnerabilities with SPSs (sabotage, missiles,
lasers, hacking, cartels, divergent interests of habitats occupants and
Earthlings) -- as well as dismissing the security advantages of making
grid use optional. For example, it seems to me you can't both argue for
creating a space manufacturing infrastrucutre beyond what we have now
while discounting the use of such an advanced infrastructure to make
missiles that can hit SPSs (even if they are in GEO). Likewise, one
can't assume potnetially remotely operated systems like SPSs which will
need to be periodically taken off-line for repairs in space or on the
ground while at the sametime discounting that a ground based terrorist
could somehow gain control of this system (even if that takes torturing
SPS engineers for security access codes etc.) So, SPSs IMHO really do
assume world peace and a John Lennon "Imagine" future -- which is a
laudible goal, but an unstated prerequisite assumption of the SPS
rationale (as opposed to just a likely consequence).

D. Your arguments sometimes dismiss out of hand obvious answers to key
problems you cite in previous renewable experiments or grid connection
issues. For example, one can produce Hydrogen and then use fuel cells or
turbines to produce electricity -- thus leveling production output
across a period of weeks or months, allowing for predictable daily
energy output (at admittedly some more complexity and cost, likely
reduceable once mass produced). There are other energy storage
approaches too (flywheeels, reverse hydro pumping, compressed air, etc.)
This idea of using intermediate energy storage like Hydrogen+fuelcells
potentially addresses most of the grid issues you raise related to
fluctuating energy production. You sometimes assume such solutions will
be hard to maintain when they might become as easy to use or maintain as
a computer UPS or a dishwasher (or even automobile) when in mass
production and become widely understood by the average electrician or
plumber.

E. Your arguments sometimes ignore the potentially pernicious political
effects of capital centralization on society and a related minute by
minute dependency of the mass of humanity on a small technological elite
for their essential services. You sometimes also ignore the other
implications of the fact that people may want a solution to energy
security problems (such as in developing nations or the US) a lot sooner
than twenty years or so from now, or that they may have concerns
politically about what nations run such systems. Right now, by
mishandling 9/11 and attacking Iraq preventatively on flimsy grounds, GW
Bush has managed to get the rest of the world to go from saying "we are
all Americans" to pretty much despising the US throroughly. So, it is
unlikwly there will be any international support for an SPS network
driven by US energy needs or by the US energy industry. Thus, absent
world peace, we already have with any SPS proposal the beginnings of an
international conflict over space resources, the militarization of
space, possible "preventive" Earthly warfare to prevent the US or
another country from gaining an economic advantage of dominating the
worlds energy supply from orbit, and so on. Contrast that built in
political conflict over space resources with instead everyone worldwide
just having passive solar homes with solar shingles which also act as
batteries and inverters, produced by multiple local companies worldwide,
using non-polluting closed-cycle production techniques. Which approach
seems more intrinsically secure for most of humanity for a long time
(absent world peace)?

F. Your arguments sometimes ignore the cost of maintaining the grid and
the value from both security and environmental reasons in coming up with
a way to eliminate the grid entirely for most locations. Eliminating the
grid entirely from an area would allowing the return of utility right of
ways to other uses, like PV power generation or walking trails.
Eliminating power line right of ways would also reduce the environmental
damage caused by maintaining grid right of ways such as by spraying
herbicides or by cutting down trees leading to soil erosion.

G. Your arguments sometimes ignore that about 1% of the US's surface is
already occupied with energy production from mining, pipelines, utility
right of ways, buffer zones around centralized nuke plants, and so on --
so PV in particular may not require substantially more land put into
energy use than already is used for that -- it would just require using
the land differently.

I'll admit though that I have been guilty of some handwaving and that
some of these issues above arise from your obviously sincere and
energetic attempt to injects some numbers and expert opinion into this
discussion. We in part just listen to different experts :-) [in my case,
inclusing Amory Lovins and RMI].

All this is despite my willingness to grant, for the sake of argument,
there will be no major unforeseen technical problems in developing SPSs
and Habitats in a tense twenty or so year timeframe upon which all of
humanity's technical future would be suddenly dependent -- given the
likely ending of investment in all other R&D in energy if people really
believed SPS was better than twenty years of continuing Earthly R&D on
energy.

And it is also despite that SSI's visionary idea of gathering together
Senior Associates who can fund or help participate in R&D to develop
space habitats is an approach made even more viable in the internet age,
potentially allowing such people to design and deploy habitats (or
seeds) directly rather than needing something like SPS to justify such
work (since self-replicating space habitats like JD Bernal envisioned in
the 1920s are IMHO justifiable for their own sake). Thus SSI needs the
SPS idea less and less to justify habitats and related research. I still
maintain that the time has come to abandon the SPS idea as rapidly
becoming obsolete. This is not to say that once habitats have been built
for other reasons that SPSs might not be used to power Earth bound
launch systems, inter-asteroid space transportation networks, or perhaps
someday even some Earthly cities (once we have a more peaceful world
requiring more social justice, fairness, equitable distribution of land
and other resources, etc. -- as well as easy ways to produce and store
and consume hydrogen etc. as a buffer for when SPSs fail).

I'm going to send this short rebuttal now, and hopefully if I have time
and energy and the interest later I can go point by point through the
rest of the email you posted and show which difficulty applies to each
specific point you raise or dismiss relating to SPS vs. renewables. I
may not though, as personally I am getting to the point where I would
rather focus more energy on other issues. I do think it has been a
stimulating discussion though and has made me think hard about my beliefs.

--Paul Fernhout

P.S. I haven't looked at in detail, but I think the house example with
numbers you list may reduce available PV power twice (perhaps using an
already daily average solar energy amount and then factoring in peak
daylight hours again), also may assume a panel that is not sloped, and
may also uses an overly inflated home energy use expectations (which
probably includes assuming electric radiant heat (not heat pump) & no
passive solar or good insulation). Also (guessing) probably 80% of the
world's population lives closer to the equator than that example. And of
course, again, as with point A above, the cost estimate ignores the
announced theoretical breakthrough proposed to lead to PV production in
a couple years with an installed cost down to $0.20 / watt per twenty
years, and so is again comparing Apples and Oranges (off-the-shelf PV
now vs. idealized SPS in twenty years).

P.P.S Niagara Mohawk gets some power from "fuel-less" hydroelectric
systems -- so your analysis may be slightly off there as it uses fuel
cost in a calculation (though I was otherwise impressed by it!).