NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t I’m GrimNasty
I don’t know if Grant Shapps ever signed up for Look and Learn when he was younger, but circumstantial evidence suggests he may have done well. I have a hazy memory, it was the first time I read about the idea of channeling the energy generated by the sun from space into a long-defunct children’s magazine. Shapps is now so excited about the idea that he has just approved a £4.3m grant to UK universities to help develop it. A quarter of Britain’s energy could one day be obtained this way, he claimed.
I’m not reluctant to technologists’ wages. The role of government is well-suited to funding the development of promising science and technologies that might otherwise struggle to get private funding in their early years. And who knows, maybe one day it will become a practical means of generating energy. In space, of course, it’s always sunny — and the sun’s light is much stronger, without having to pass through Earth’s atmosphere.
But a quarter of the UK’s energy, and in time helping the UK reach its goal of net zero by 2050? Let’s dream. There’s a reason that harnessing solar energy from space has remained a pipe dream for the past 50 years. That is great difficulty. First, you have to design solar panels that are light enough to launch into space and will continue to generate huge amounts of electricity without maintenance for many years – not just generating enough electricity to power your solar panels. power for a few devices for a few months, as the solar panels on a space probe thrown into outer space can do. But the much larger issue is how do you channel the energy down to Earth so it can be used? The California Institute of Technology says it has succeeded in transmitting a small amount of wireless energy from a satellite to Earth. But there’s a long way to go between that and commercial activity.
Shapps’ enthusiasm can be quite endearing. “People think it’s impossible to put a man on the Moon, or to split the atom. You follow the science and the impossible becomes possible,” he said in support of the UK’s effort to harness solar energy from space. Of course, what he didn’t do was list the many wondrous technologies that still exist 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 people recall Nasa’s promise to send humans to Mars in 1980. Just as the promise of tourists to the Moon has yet to come true. What is possible and what makes commercial sense are two very different things. No one knows yet what the price of solar energy generated in space will be – if it ever comes to fruition. By the way, we also don’t have the nuclear fusion energy that the head of the US nuclear power industry told us in 1954 would be ‘too cheap to measure’ in his day. his grandson. In fact, we still don’t have a working fusion power plant.
I’m not Luddite. Let’s have a go at all of these. The trouble, however, is that the government has committed Britain to achieve network no greenhouse gas emissions over a 27-year period assuming many unproven technologies will magically emerge in time. There is a fine line between Panglossian optimism and foolishness, and I fear Grant Shapps has strayed in that line.
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