0191-9067/80/040351-10$02.00/0 Copyright c 1980 SUNSAT Energy Council SOLAR POWER SATELLITES FOR EUROPE* J. RUTH+ ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands W. WESTPHAL Institut fur Luft- und Raumfahrt Technische Universitat Berlin Abstract — This paper deals with the potential utilisation of Solar Power Satellites (SPS) as baseload power plants for Western European countries. There are significant differences compared with the USA for geographical, political, organisational, orbital, and industrial reasons. These differences have been analysed and critically examined, but no insurmountable problems have been found. There exist, however, a lot of hard and challenging problems to be solved prior to a full-scale SPS development. In this paper recommendations are made for a number of steps to be taken by European countries to complement the SPS state of the art for their purposes and to enable a participation in a potential SPS programme. INTRODUCTION Solar Power Satellites were more and more taken into serious consideration as a long-term energy option in the past two years. This was the reason for us to investigate European aspects and particularities of SPS under ESA contract. Reviewing nearly all of the most important publications of the recent years we found out the current state-of-the-art of SPS development and identified a lot of problems being connected with it (1-6). The next step of our work was to analyse the validity of these results for a potential application of SPS to Western Europe. During this examination it became clear that there are some substantial differences compared with an application of SPS to the USA, which would require different solutions. Our study was completed by some recommendations for further SPS studies in Europe being derived directly out of our investigations. After presenting a short overview of the most important European aspects of SPS, this report will discuss the proposals for European study programmes. PARTICULAR ASPECTS CONCERNING SPS APPLICATION TO WESTERN EUROPE Since the geographical situation of Western Europe is quite different compared to that of the USA, we started our investigations with the potential implications which might occur from the higher latitudes in Europe. The latitudinal range of Europe is *Based on a paper presented at the 30th IAF Congress, Munich, September 1979. tVisiting scientist.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==