Space Solar Power Review Vol 12 Num 3&4

g) increase of economic and business activity, international trade and scientific- technological cooperation as well as improvement of political climate and appearance of the alternative for armament expenditures. Formation of the world energy system will obviously proceed gradually (by stages) starting from the modem state of national and regional energy systems. The ways of transition will depend on future conditions which seem now to be very uncertain. Uncertainty in the possibility (and terms) of creating safe nuclear reactors and cheap photovoltaic cells influence WES structure most of all. Nuclear and solar energies are the only alternatives to fossil fuel that can be developed in a really large scale, though both are rather expensive. If attempts of safe nuclear reactor creation are not successful, then the nuclear way will be impossible and only the solar alternative is left. With the restriction of fossil fuel consumption this case will be the most difficult. However, in the general case the whole spectrum of energy forms (oil, coal, electricity, solar and nuclear energy) should be considered in WES structure. Depending on the total energy demands, admissible volumes of CO2 emission and economic indexes of various energy forms (their competition with each other), the scales of development of various specialized systems included in WES will be different (down to zero). Figure 1 illustrates the principal structure of WES for such a general case. A multitude of specialized energy systems is aggregated into large energy centers (complexes) into a multi-product system. Other WES elements and local heat supply systems are not specified. The WES concept certainly requires rather broad discussion by international experts or teams. Some peculiarities of WES caused by energy supply from space are considered in the next section. Varieties of the world energy system with large-scale energy supply from Space Solar power satellites (SPS) on the geostationary orbit (which rotate at the speed of Earth's rotation and "hang" over the receiver or rectenna) with a capacity of about 5 GW [6] and the Lunar power system (LPS) with a capacity of 20000 GW [7] are the most interesting projects for space energy systems utilizing solar energy and transmitting it to the Earth via microwave beams. One more large-scale project on recovery of Helium-3 at the Moon with its transportation to the Earth and subsequent utilization in fusion reactors [8] is not directly a space energy system (the fusion reactors are located on the Earth). Other known proposals (for example, [9, 10]) are of insufficient scale for the world energy system and can be treated as intermediate stages in realization of the first two projects. Solar power satellites or rather their terrestrial part - rectennas - can surely be the WES elements. An individual satellite as an energy source will differ negligibly from

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