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But a detailed new analysis from the energy blog The Oil Drum has a solution. It relies on the Skylon, a rocket plane being developed by Reaction Engines, and a system of ground-based lasers that would hit the plane on its way into orbit, heating hydrogen on board to provide an extra burst of acceleration. This would allow the plane to get satellite components into space for under $100 per kilogram, making the total cost of solar energy from space as low as 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, half the price of coal.
How is the measure of coal power calculated?
Not knowing is to assume, or believe, that the measuring is accurate.
In order to know what I mean I can offer an illustration.
A. Hover Dam
B. One Solar Panel System on One House multiplied by the total number of Solar Panel Systems on many houses
C. A future Space Based Solar Panel System
D. The Present Coal Powered Electric Generating System.
If you do not have solar power being generated at your house, then you have not yet invested the cost of getting to the point where you are using free sunlight to generate your supply of electricity. You do not yet have electricity made at your home. You do not yet have electricity at home, for home use, and you do not have electricity at home for sale to someone else who needs electricity - not yet.
Hover Dam is already built.
What does it cost to power Hover Dam? Gravity, and water, turn turbines at Hover Dam, and the cost of building Hover Dam is already spent, and Hover Dam requires maintenance, and Hover Dam sends electricity through a network of wires called The Grid, and each length of wire in The Grid is a cost of electric power, a resistance, a load, and all these things must be accurately calculated if the idea is to compare the relative cost of Hover Dam to the relative cost of you buying Solar Panels so that you can generate your own electricity at home, for home use, or for sale, as you generate your own electricity as an income source, as you sell your own surplus power for cash.
Hover Dam and your home Solar Panel System use free supplies (gravity, water, sunlight) as the fuel that runs those profitable electric generating systems.
Coal uses coal, which is not free, to run that electric generating system.
If the reader intends to measure the cost/benefit calculation that includes "government subsidy" then each system must include that same scrutiny, accurately, if the actual idea is to know the true relative cost/benefit, and political/economic, measure.
Howard Bloom is one of the proponents of Space Based Electric Power - if I understand the facts.