Solar Power Satellites: Energy Source for the Greenhouse Century? MARTIN I. HOFFERT, SETH D. POTTER, MURALI N. KADIRAMANGALAM & FRANCESCO TUBIELLOf SUMMARY Energy is needed to produce wealth, and an increasing world population will need increasing amounts of energy to improve its standard of living. Through the use of a carbon cycle model, it is shown that continued reliance on fossil fuels will cause a global greenhouse warming. An energy-CO 2-economics model is used to project future demand for fossil-fuel-generated energy. When this demand is compared with the fossil fuel use that is permissible if a global warming is to be avoided, a shortfall in energy becomes evident. Terrestrial photovoltaics, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and the solar power satellite (SPS) are examined as means of making up this energy shortfall. On comparing these technologies, the SPS appears to be the most feasible means of providing the required energy and preventing a global warming. Laser, 2.45 GHz, and 35 GHz SPS technologies are intercompared, and results indicate that the 2.45 GHz technology remains the most feasible SPS option. Introduction Anthropogenic CO2 emissions, predominantly from fossil fuel combustion, have increased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from a pre-industrial value of about 270 parts per million (ppm) to about 350 ppm today. Climate models predict that the Earth will warm by 1.5 to as much as 4.5 °C due to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Possible consequences of a greenhouse effect range from a rise in the sea level, causing flooding of lowlands, to a shift in weather patterns. Many schemes have been suggested to decrease the amount of CO2 being put into the atmosphere, including injecting the CO2 emissions into the ocean,1 afforestation, fertilizing the Antarctic waters to increase carbon uptake, and some more esoteric schemes such as preventing the melting of the polar ice caps and changing the Earth's surface albedo by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. Some of these schemes are extremely energy intensive, others are only curative in nature, and some may have disastrous "side-effects" on the climate system. The only reliable path toward preventing a global warming is the reduction of fossil fuel combustion over the next few decades and the next century. 1 Department of Applied Science, New York University, 26-36 Stuyvesant Street, New York, New York 10003, USA.
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