Why Sustainable Power is Unsustainable

>While I'm not at all averse to orbiting solar power satellites, as I
>noted before we don't strictly speaking "need" to build them,
>because one can also build nuclear power plants -- which are also
>"sustainable" -- down here on Earth.

Nuclear plants, eventually tens of thousands of them are the next
best thing in terms of scaling and being there when you need them.

But if we can build power sats less expensively than nuclear plants
it makes sense to do so.

Nuclear plants cost in the range of $8000 per installed kW.

I can make a case for power sats in the range of $800/kW.

it would be easy to do with a moving cable space elevator (on the
order of $10/kg to GEO). There is another way that might do it, a
suborbital rocket stage to get out of the atmosphere and a gigantic
ablation laser to push 100 tons per hr out to GEO.

Details if anyone is interested.

Keith Henson