SRC-029

Space Solar Power: The First International Assessment of Space Solar Power - Opportunities, Issues and Potential Pathways Forward

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-0928 In 2011 an international study group said the last whole-system analysis of space solar power was done in 1997. The American National Research Council had already found the underlying studies missing in four technology areas in 2001. If these are the same gap, which is a reading and not something either body says, it was four years old when the NRC found it and still open ten years after that.
• CLM-0929 A search of the 2011 international assessment finds no power-density limit set by the ionosphere, and it mentions the ionosphere only twice in substance: once to say that tests from low orbit to the ground would be useful for understanding the beam's interaction with it, and once in a historical table of past experiments. The search used set terms and could miss a limit written in other units or other words.
• CLM-0936 The IAA's 2011 assessment says that enough solar power satellites to supply the whole world would warm the Earth by less than 0.006 degrees C. A footnote gives the full method, and redoing the sum with the source's own numbers gives 0.0062 degrees C, slightly more than the bound the sentence states. The same footnote's other figure, for a single satellite, does check out. So the method is sound and the word "less" is wrong: it should say about 0.006 degrees C.
• CLM-0937 A 2024 law review article quotes a 2011 assessment's figure for how much solar power satellites would warm the Earth. The assessment said "less than 0.006 degrees C". The article says the systems "would likely cause a 0.006 degrees C rise". Dropping "less than" turns a ceiling into a prediction, and it is not flagged as a change. Everything else about the citation is correct, and by luck the changed version is nearer the true figure than the original was.

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