Duration: 6 months
Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) has long been considered an environmentally friendly baseload renewable energy technology. Despite this, these is very little evidence to support this claim, with environmental modelling of space systems still in their embryonic stages. This study aims to quantify the environmental life cycle impacts of different SBSP technologies with a goal of identifying hotspots (beyond merely embodied CO2 emissions). This will allow innovative mitigation measures to be implemented to ensure that SBSP technologies align with both carbon budgets (defined under the 2 degree mitigation pathway defined by the Paris Agreement) & planetary boundaries (defined by Rockstrom et al., 2009). More specifically, this study will address the identified hotspots through the application of ecodesign principles an as an active method of footprint reduction to generate a more sustainable SBSP architectures, considering the space, launch, ground & infrastructure segments. Primary & secondary data will be collected from the UK Space Energy Initiative, Metasat UK, ESA & online literature for the DOE/NASA Reference, CASSIOPeiA, MORPHEUS & ESA SOLARIS SBSP systems. The Strathclyde Space Systems Database (SSSD) and/or ESA LCA Database will be used to model each SBSP system & calculate their environmental impacts. Based on this, the hotspots of each impact category will be identified. Normalisation & weighting procedures will then be applied to determine the most critical environmental impact to address, based on the single score methodology already defined in each database. To address these impacts, desk-based research will be conducted to suggest viable methods of impact reduction which do not compromise the technical design aspects. These will then be run through the LCA database again to determine the environmental reduction possible. The expected output of the study is the generation of more sustainable & viable SPS architectures with potential for commercialisation.
