A Plant on One Page: a Worked 2 GW Example
What would a single 2-gigawatt space solar plant look like, end to end, on Setcoin's reference assumptions?
Chapter summary
a structure of about 20,000 tonnes in geostationary orbit, collecting roughly 11 GW of sunlight on several square kilometres of arrays, transmitting through a kilometre-wide antenna at 5.8 GHz to a rectenna about 4.5 km across, delivering about 2 GW to the grid around the clock.
Key takeaways
- 1
It would take about 200 heavy launches over four years, cost about $55 billion, of which about $50 billion is launch, and produce about 16.6 terawatt-hours a year, at a cost of electricity of about $357 per megawatt-hour.
- 2
This chapter walks through the numbers so that the rest of the study can refer to one consistent example.
Key figures in this chapter
- ~11 GW
- sunlight collected in orbit
- ~20,000 t
- mass at 10 kg/kW
- ~200
- launches of 100 t
- ~$54.6B
- capital in the reference case
Source: Setcoin calculation
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