SRC-043

Space Solar vs Base Load Ground Solar and Wind Power

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-0198 The same 2010 paper gives two very different price tags, about $650 million and about $5 billion, for storing the same amount of electricity (26 gigawatt-hours, about one day's supply for a city the size of Austin, Texas). The paper does not explain why the two numbers differ.
• CLM-0199 The paper estimates that just launching the parts for a 1-gigawatt space solar power satellite would cost at least $25 billion, using 2010-era, pre-reusable-rocket launch prices scaled up from the Ariane V rocket. The author calls this launch cost alone "uneconomic." Adding the cost of building the satellite and the ground antenna brings the total to about $30 billion per gigawatt, which is far above the $1-5 billion per gigawatt the paper cites for building a new fossil-fuel or nuclear power plant.

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