We were pleased to present the results of our OSIP study: The Greater Earth Lunar Power Station at the International (On-line) Conference on Energy from Space organized by ESA and the UK space agency.
The Greater Earth Lunar Power Station (GE⊕-LPS)
Arthur Woods, Andreas Vogler, Patrick Collins, Dmitrijis Gasperovics
Astrostrom GmbH, 8259 Kaltenbach, Switzerland
Keywords: SBSP, SPS, GE⊕-LPS, Lunar, Energy, Climate
Abstract
In the context of ESA’s Open Space Innovation Platform Campaign on ‘Clean Energy – New Ideas for Solar Power from Space’ and its recently announced SOLARIS programme, Astrostrom GmbH has been investigating the feasibility of a “Greater Earth Lunar Power Station” (GE⊕-LPS) (*) manufactured on the Moon and assembled at the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1 to provide power from lunar orbit to operations on the surface of the Moon. Once the initial station is in operation, the production facilities on the lunar surface could be then used to produce additional Solar Power Satellites (SPS) to be shipped into Earth orbits to deliver clean baseload solar energy to Earth. This ‘Space Energy Option’ would contribute to a massive reduction of the use of fossil fuels for energy production on the way towards meeting international climate and energy targets. The GE⊕-LPS is a crewed facility in lunar orbit that will be constructed primarily from lunar materials. Shown to be both feasible and scalable, manufacturing future SPS components from lunar materials and transporting these to geostationary orbit (GEO), would be a means to avoid the need to launch hundreds or thousands of massive SPSs from the surface of the Earth in order to supply environmentally benign, baseload electricity to Earth. The construction of GE⊕-LPS with lunar materials requires developing facilities on the Moon for automated mining and manufacturing processes. The materials required for GE⊕-LPS structure include cast basalt and basalt fibre for the structural elements. The solar panels would be manufactured from iron pyrite monograin-layer solar cells produced on the Moon, whereas metals such as iron and aluminium will serve for the electrical connections. This approach to realizing Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) could reduce the amount of mass for a SPS launched from Earth by 80% or more as well as reducing costs and the related CO2 emissions. The establishment of industrial-scale, robotic beneficiation and processing plants will provide access to several other materials, which may become valuable to other users in the cislunar region. In addition to small amounts of Helium-3, a vast amount of oxygen will be produced as a by-product which can be used in life support systems and as rocket propellant, thereby creating additional business cases for new cislunar enterprises. The Astrostrom study also outlined a business case based on the terrestrial energy market and the demand for clean energy on Earth. BloombergNEF and other organizations have estimated that the European energy transition will be a 5 trillion Euro or more investment opportunity. Based on the study, just 2% of the cost of the European energy transition – € 99 billion or less – would be sufficient to install the infrastructure needed to begin manufacturing SPS components on the Moon which could soon be repaid from SBSP electricity sales to Earth.
(*) Note: The ‘⊕’ symbol is an ancient European symbol for planet Earth: it is used here to mean “Greater Earth”, a region defined by the Earth’s gravitational field, which includes the Moon.
Our presentation slide deck can be downloaded here.
Video: Greater Earth Energy Synergies from the presentation.
