Solar Space. Out of this world, or a realistic option?
Everything Electric Podcast
The Fully Charged Show
4.9 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2021
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Helen speaks to Ian Cash the Chief Engineer of IECL about the prospect of space based solar power. How can it be done, is it viable?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Fully Charged Show podcast, I'm Helen Cherisky. |
| 0:26.7 | This week we are going to be flying high all the way out into space. |
| 0:31.2 | We know that our energy on earth is limited, but the sun sitting there at the middle of |
| 0:35.9 | the solar system emits energy in all directions and earth only crosses a tiny fraction of its |
| 0:42.2 | total energy output. |
| 0:43.7 | So there's lots of other energy out there which is carrying on out into the universe, could |
| 0:47.6 | we make use of some of the rest? |
| 0:50.0 | Well this week we're going to be talking about space-based solar power which the acronym |
| 0:56.0 | for that is SBSP which is a terrible acronym for too hard to say, but could we collect |
| 1:02.4 | energy up there out in space and transport it down to earth? |
| 1:05.7 | It sounds like something that's out of a sci-fi book for the 1960s but you know we live |
| 1:10.4 | in quite a sci-fi world, could you make this work in practice? |
| 1:14.1 | This week's guest is Ian Cash who's the chief engineer of IECL and his company have |
| 1:19.0 | got a design for a system that could apparently do this and there's also a general government |
| 1:23.6 | feasibility study that's going on at the moment so perhaps this is closer than we all think. |
| 1:29.2 | Now I have to confess right up front that I'm a skeptic about this, I can see so many |
| 1:34.2 | obstacles to making this work and they're not really the engineering obstacles. |
| 1:39.6 | The thing that I think we need to think about here is who owns the orbits of satellites, |
| 1:43.9 | who decides who gets to use them, the radio frequencies you need to communicate in space |
| 1:48.6 | and to send energy around using this system like everyone is going to fight even more |
| 1:53.7 | than they do now over radio frequencies in the future. |
| 1:57.2 | There's the regulations like who just you know who makes the laws about all of this and |
... |
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