Comparison of terrestrial PV and SPS

Thanks for the link -- I'm dowloading the PDF now (wish people would
just use HTML!). I'll need to read it to see if he just assumes ground
PV will be in big facilities linked into the grid or analyzes gridless
local use without grid delivery costs vs. gridded SPS operations for
expected costs in a couple decades. It is interesting to see in the
excerpt you quote a sense that ground based solar will definitely
preceed SSPS -- it's just a matter of whether SSPS than proves
advantageous over what much improved ground PV delivers (capital cost
and storage cost and construction pollution being major potential areas
of benefit for SSPS -- yet facing a huge cost to get started with SSPS
and also facing distribution costs and other costs from grid maintenance
and security etc.).

Update: Oops -- just finished downloading it and it won't run in the
Ghostscript PDF display system under GNU/Linux. Wish NASA would try to
make its works more accesible by just putting them in text files or HTML
or OpenOffice or RTF! (The PDF "standard" even through in a book is
complex and sometimes ambiguous and only the proprietary implementations
from Adobe really define it... As Alan Kay said, any written standard of
more than threee lines is ambiguous -- why we need standards defined by
free implimentations.) Well, I'll poke around some more and see whether
something else can read it or if it just maybe was a corrupt download.

--Paul Fernhout