University of Houston • University of Houston-Clear Lake • ISSO Annual Report Y2002—pp. 116-117

Using the Sun’s Energy To Power Earth—A Solution for World Energy

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS DAVID CRISWELL concedes he may appear slightly off the wall with his idea for snaring sunbeams on the Moon and transforming that solar power into electric gold for mankind. The promises are grand—cheap energy for everyone, a reduction in wars over petroleum resources, a new source of wealth unlike anything seen before, and the opening of the solar system to human exploration and habitation. Cheap unlimited power is what people need, and Criswell, who has eighteen patents in space and terrestrial solar power and space transportation, says he has a plan that can deliver.

His vision is solidly grounded in engineering and economics. He is the director of the University of Houston Institute for Space Systems Operations, has worked on the Apollo missions, and directed major research projects and technical review programs at the Lunar and Planetary Institute for NASA. When the shuttle Columbia exploded last February, he was among the experts assembled by The Wall Street Journal for an online roundtable about what the tragedy would mean for the United States Space program.

For twenty years, he has touted something called the Lunar Solar Power System. And he has published more than 250 research articles and contract and advisory reports on the economics of returning to the Moon to provide electricity to Earth.

An advocate, such as Robert Ayres, a professor from a top European business school in Fontainbleau, France, says, "The benefits could be enormous. Criswell is a seriously under-recognized scientist whose problem is that he is too far ahead of his contemporaries." Ayres, a former professor of engineering and

public policy at Carnegie-Mellon University and a physicist by training, continues, "I believe his proposal should be taken very seriously . . . I don’t see any major risks, except the normal risks of accompanying any venture outside the Earth’s atmosphere."

And foes, who counter with other energy systems or lack of feasibility, are silenced because Criswell can respond with a scientific answer to prove the Lunar Solar Power System can work. His recent article in The Industrial Physicist was downloaded a record 18,000 times in six weeks.

The best concept calls for solar energy to be collected on the lunar surface by converters that feed the energy to microwave generators, which would transmit the power to several thousand receivers around the Earth. Each receiver would capture the microwave beam, less intense than the noontime sun, and supply commercial electricity to regional power grids that would continuously provide the equivalent of about two kilowatts per person.

What can two kilowatts do?

For starters, that is enough electricity to allow every person living in poverty in the Third World to achieve a European standard of living. "This power will come out as cheap electricity. It will be so cheap that you can use it in ways never thought of before," he explains.

Criswell—who organized and administered the review of the first 3,500 proposals submitted to NASA for lunar science, the first 1,000 for flight on the shuttle, as well as some 21,000 external reviews—points out how the Tennessee Valley Authority created abundant water and electrical resources that transformed the Appalachian region of the United States from a poor, underdeveloped rural area into a thriving region. Cheap power from the Moon can do the same thing for everyone on Earth.

"The implications are enormous," he says. "The challenge we face is to provide sustainable, clean, affordable electric power for the world. If you could do that, it would enable worldwide prosperity on the level that Western Europe or Japan, or even the U.S., has now. It would be a net new wealth, wealth that can’t be created otherwise without depleting the resources of Earth. It would be truly sustainable. It would be widespread."

He likens the Lunar Solar Power System to the grand tradition of construction on the magnitude of the Panama Canal, the U. S. interstate highway system, or bringing rail to the West or across Siberia.

How much power is he talking about?

Put electrical power into proper perspective by looking at the energy required to power a 100-watt light bulb.

"Keeping your 100-watt light bulb going for a year requires the power plant in Houston to burn a flow of approximately 660 pounds of coal over that same year," Criswell explains. "The United States gets the majority of its electric power from the burning of coal, and we use an average of 11,000 watts of thermal or heat energy per person. The 270 million people in the United States use three terawatts [3,000,000,000,000 watts]."

Criswell estimates that the world—at about six billion people as of 2002—needs two to three times more commercial thermal power than the fourteen terawatts now provided by current energy sources.

Earth’s Moon continually drinks in enough terawatts of solar energy—some 13,000—for every man, woman, and child on Earth to use as much electricity as needed with plenty left over.

The solar power to be harvested from the surface of the Moon is unlimited, Criswell says, without the drawbacks of other energy systems. Solar collectors on Earth lose much of their ability to generate electricity on cloudy days, and generating electricity at night is out of the question. Hydroelectric geothermal, ocean movement, nuclear, coal, oil, and gas as energy systems are unreliable or limited by geographic location, or finite, or linked to pollution.

He sees a direct correlation between cheap solar-derived electricity and an end to warfare over dwindling oil resources. He claims that his power system—co-invented with Dr. Robert D. Waldron—will help eliminate power struggles over oil and gas resources by providing a cheap source of renewable energy.

"The world is energy poor now. We’ve had decades of public concern over the environment and how our energy use affects the environment and how the use of oil creates political instability around the world."

Oil has been, and continues to be, a key factor in regional and global wars. Daniel Yergin, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 book, The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, makes that point in the concluding paragraph: "Oil has helped to make possible mastery over the physical world. . . . It has also fueled the global struggles for political and economic primacy. Much blood has been spilled in its name. The fierce and sometimes violent quest for oil—and for the riches and power it conveys—will surely continue so long as oil holds a central place."

A prosperous world could exhaust projected resources of oil and natural gas in twenty years and coal in seventy-five years. The Lunar Solar Power System electricity can preserve oil as the source of plastic and other petroleum products so vital to our civilization. Once the lunar-based power system is in operation, the world will change forever, Criswell says.

Worldwide prosperity is not an illusion, agrees Kevin Bassler, assistant professor of physics at UH. He is the 2001 recipient of a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship awarded to researchers who make fundamental contributions to new knowledge.

"Criswell has really demonstrated it is not a pie-in-the-sky idea," says Bassler, who specializes in economo-physics, which applies the principles of physics to financial situations where normal economic models break down. "His economic analysis is quite convincing. The Lunar Solar Power System will be done. Down the road it will happen, because there is no other feasible possibility to solve the world’s power needs."

And what keeps the Lunar Solar Power System from being implemented?

"There is not a community that can fight for it in competition with other long-established energy systems," answers Criswell. "It requires the cooperation of several communities that simply do not talk to one another: lunar science, microwave optics, and industrial glass companies."

Twenty years is a long time. Has he lost faith? The answer is simple. "No."

He read about the conquest of space in Collier’s magazine when he was a ten-year-old in his hometown of Rhome, Texas. He’s been a self-acknowledged "space cadet" ever since and participated in the amazing highs and lows of the space program almost from its beginnings. The Institute for Space Systems Operations that he oversees was established by the Texas Legislature in 1991 and has funded more than 170 projects at UH and UH-Clear Lake that further space exploration and development.

"I’ve been interested in finding an economic driver that would push us into space," he says. His vision goes beyond cheap energy for all and sees humanity inhabiting the solar system and reaching for the stars. "It should not just push us," he muses. "It should draw us."

Text and chart originally published as "UH’s Man on the Moon," in Collegium, The Magazine of the University of Houston (Spring 2003): 16-19. Text was written by Philip Montgomery; Karleen Koen, Senior Managing Editor; reproduced with permission.