Government’s new net zero plan might be its most idiotic yet
By Paul Homewood
h/t Me GrimNasty
I don’t know whether Grant Shapps ever took out a subscription to Look and Learn when he was young, but circumstantial evidence would suggest that he might well have done. It was in the long-defunct children’s magazine, I have a vague recollection, that I first read about the idea of beaming solar-generated power down from space. Shapps is now so taken with the idea that he has just approved a £4.3 million grant to UK universities to help develop it. A quarter of Britain’s energy, he claims, could one day be obtained in this way.
I don’t begrudge the technologists their public money. It is a perfectly proper role of government to fund the development of science and promising technologies which might otherwise struggle to obtain private funding in their early years. And who knows, maybe it will one day turn out to be a practical means of generating energy. Up in space, of course, it is always sunny – and the sunlight is much stronger, having not had to travel through the Earth’s atmosphere.
But a quarter of the UK’s energy, and in time to help Britain reach its 2050 net zero target? Dream on. There is a reason that the exploitation of solar energy from space has remained a pipe dream for the past 50 years. It is fantastically difficult. First, you have to design solar panels which are light enough to launch into space and will continue to generate massive amounts of power without maintenance for many years – not just generating enough electricity to power a few instruments for a few months, as a solar panel on a space probe flung into outer space might do. But the far bigger issue is, how do you then transmit the power down to Earth so that it can be used? The Californian Institute of Technology says it has succeeded in beaming a small amount of energy wirelessly from a satellite to Earth. But there is a long, long way to go between that and commercial operation.
Shapps’ enthusiasm can be quite endearing. “People thought it was impossible to land a man on the Moon, or impossible to split the atom. You follow the science and the impossible becomes possible,” he said in backing the UK’s effort for harnessing solar energy from space. What he didn’t do, of course, was to list the many miracle technologies which have remained pies in the sky. Everyone remembers President Kennedy’s promise in 1961 to put a man on the Moon by the end of that decade.
Few recall Nasa’s promise to put a man on Mars by 1980. Nor have the promised tourist jaunts to the Moon yet materialised. What is possible and what makes commercial sense are two very different things. No-one yet knows what the price of solar power generated in space will be – if it ever comes to fruition. Nor, incidentally, do we yet have the nuclear fusion-generated power which the head of the US nuclear energy industry told us in 1954 would be ‘too cheap to meter’ by his grandchildren’s day. In fact, we still don’t have a single functioning nuclear fusion power station.
I’m no Luddite. Let’s have a go at all this stuff. Trouble is, though, that the government has committed Britain to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions in 27 years’ time on the presumption that multiple as-yet unproven technologies will miraculously arrive in time. There is a fine line between optimism and Panglossian foolishness, and Grant Shapps, I fear, is on the wrong side of it.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
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Perhaps he has ideas of recreating the Icarus project from Die Another Day?
Oh boy!! The sheer chutzpah of a man like Shapps – any damn politician – saying, ‘we must follow the science’, is just too much to take.
Grant Shapps – the man with 5 GCSE’s running the UK’s Energy Security and Net Zero policies.
Which actually plays to my theory that the Tories are designing the death of NetZero in time for the 2024 elections.
Putting this utter dimwit in charge of anything is a guarantee of its failure.
Izaac Azimov wrote an excellent short story about a solar power station in orbit “Reason” in 1941; well worth reading. What could possibly go wrong!
Come to think of it, it could be an awesome weapon. Microwave armies from space. On the other hand it is an easy target.
Larry Bond -“Red Phoenix”
Lee Correy – “Manna”
‘But the far bigger issue is, how do you then transmit the power down to Earth so that it can be used?’
No, there is a bigger issue, still.
“When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember your objective was to drain the swamp.”
The objective – allegedly – is to reduce the warming of earth. If that’s your real goal, capturing energy outside earth’s realm and directing it towards earth is colossally stupid.
Grunt Schitts is monumentally fick.
John Brignal of Numberwatch did an analysis of all these electrical pies in the sky, with not workable. Can’t find it though.
Nikola Tesla tried this in 1902 at Colorado springs, but transmitting power through the ether was not a success, due the the square law of waves, power diminishes by the square of the distance between the transmitter and receiver. He did invent tuned radio transmissions, so not wasted effort.
One commentator in the DT put it beautifully: ‘and this comes from a Government who believes women can have willie’s!’
It is not the proper role of Govt to fund every dreamboats wild fantasy hobby. Funding science should be left to the private sector where they actually do due diligence and cost benefit analysis. I dont want Govt wasting my money on idiot universities!
Beam me up, Scotty!
Aside from radio communication there is no point in trying to penetratw our cloud covered land with waves that will diverge, be scattered and absorbed before they reach a ground station.
It seems that in the 10 years to 2019, the government spent a measly £346.7m on fusion power. (They claim this returned £1.4b, not the £14b in the URL)
Imagine how much closer we would be if even one year’s constraint payments had been diverted, let alone the unimaginable sums wasted in total on unreliables and all the extra infrastructure and backup costs.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-investment-in-fusion-energy-boosts-british-economy-by-14-billion
Sorry, druid, that is a fallacy. Money is not the limiting factor on fusion development.
Yes, we’d be 30 years away instead the promised 30 years.
It’s only going to get more idiotic. We’ve had the slightly sensible ideas and as the deadline approaches we’ll get the walker and stupider ideas combined with increasing desperation from governments.
The idea of directing energy from the sun via some device on the edge of space is not new. The Nazi stratospheric mirror is described in https://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-orbiting-superweapon/
The problem is how to deliver a cost effective system for a questionable theory.
“It’s always sunny in space”. This alone shows the intelligence level of todays journalists, unless it’s actually a quote from Shapps. When its night time in the UK satellites above us would be in the Earth’s shadow unless they were very far out in space in which case they probably wouldn’t be on a geosynchronous orbit and wouldn’t stay above use. What’s the plan, to transmit power from one satellite in direct sunlight to numerous other ones until it reaches one directly above us or beam down energy at a very shallow angle which would presumably make it even harder to collect.
If we and everyone else were to place enough solar panels in orbit to meet our current energy needs they would block out the sun so much we’d still need loads of terrestrial power generation to compensate for the loss of ‘natural’ solar energy. The Maldives and the like would probably be agitating for compensation for their reduced sunlight!