Mr. Chairman, Dr. Glaser has described the satellite solar power station to you. Shall I describe it again or shall I assume that it is in the record? Senator Ford. I assume that we can consider it a part of the record and that Dr. Glaser explained it in terms which even I could understand—they were pretty minute. Dr. Greenblat. Very well, I do, Mr. Chairman, have a written statement and it 'will be in that written statement. Senator Ford. That would be fine. We will accept anything that you might have as part of the record and, as you brief it, if you miss something, it will be a part of the record. Dr. Greenblat. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Now, to go back to the way we arrived at our results, we decided upon a model for decisionmaking. If we could compare the satellite solar power station and terrestrial systems at today's prices—even though we know that certainly we could not put up a satellite solar power station today—and if this system were to be cost-effective or competitive with terrestrial systems today, then we could say, yes, go ahead, it is economically justifiable to make a development-to- dperational decision. If, on the other hand, we could not determine any conditions under which the SSPS would be competitive or cost effective, then we would recommend that no justifiable future work is justified. If, on the other hand, we could identify conditions in a time period in which the SSPS may be cost effective, then we could justify recommending further studies, which was basically the conclusion that I have given. Now, the baseline SSPS, according to the costs, would be about $7.6 billion on a unit-cost basis. This does not include any funds at this point for the design, development, test, and evaluation—the D.D.T. & E. Much of these costs are not spent on the satellite itself, which is only about 30 percent of the total cost, but on the ground, for the receiving ground station, and for the transportation and assembly to place the satellite into low Earth orbit, perform the assembly, and place the SSPS into the synchronous orbit from which it would operate. So the satellite itself is only about 30 percent of the $7.6 billion in cost. Using an interest rate that we felt was representative of a joint Government-commercial venture, we determined that the cost of electric generation—and this does not include transmission and distribution, which are significant components of the cost to the customer—would be about 27 mills per kilowatt hour. That includes the payback of the capital at an interest rate, again, which we believe is representative of the joint commercial-Government venture, and includes costs for maintenance and taxes and insurance, as if it were a regular operating utility. We then looked at terrestrial systems. We made some estimates of growth of—in real prices, that is, we did not consider inflation, but only scarcity prices—real economic prices, and based upon these projections we found that the SSPS may be cost-effective in the 1995 time period.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==