SRC-207

TN 04 Assessment of strategic, economic, environmental, and societal benefits, costs, and risks. Approved 11 August 2022 by Manfred Hader, Senior Partner of Roland Berger.

Commissioned by European Space Agency. Who paid for a study is recorded because it bears on how its conclusions should be read, not because it makes them wrong.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-0710 The second European study, which had never been obtained here, is now in the archive. It puts the cost of a two-gigawatt first system at 213 euros per megawatt-hour, leaving out research and decommissioning costs, which is about five times the cost of solar power today and ten times its projected cost in 2050.
• CLM-0839 A 2022 European consultancy study for ESA calculated that launching one space solar power satellite of the SPS-Alpha type would release about 2.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gas, from roughly 760 Starship flights each responsible for about 3,400 tonnes.
• CLM-0840 This 2022 ESA-commissioned study gave a total tonnage of greenhouse gas for launching a satellite but never converted it into emissions per unit of electricity, and apart from one sentence giving nitrogen oxides a carbon-dioxide-equivalent factor it did not assess the high-altitude effects of rocket exhaust.
• CLM-0841 This 2022 study was written by two European firms under contract to the European Space Agency, and it cites none of the earlier life-cycle carbon studies of space solar power from Strathclyde or Japan, so on the evidence of its citations it is a separate line of work, not another voice from those research groups.

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