Satellite solar power: Renewed interest in an age of climate change?

The concept of generating electricity using satellite solar power (SSP) has recently enjoyed renewed interest as a source of non-fossil fuel energy. First proposed in the 1960s, then studied sporadically in the past decade, SSP offers a potentially large supply of power but without the carbon emissions associated with evidence of global climate change. SSP faces challenges: competition from other non-fossil renewable energy, such as wind power, and the lead-time and costs required to assemble, test, and deploy an SSP system. At the request of a consortium of electric utilities, of NASA, and of the US National Science Foundation, this paper estimates the value of SSP in four distinct geographic regions, each differing in terms of their resource base for conventional renewable energy. Because deployment of SSP would be sometime in the future, we explicitly incorporate uncertainty in the model. We find the cost-effectiveness of SSP is highly sensitive to geographic region, to the reliability of SSP, and to the cost of carbon damages avoided by its use. The results offer guidance for decision makers in space, energy, and environment programs who must allocate scarce budgetary resources among competing public investment alternatives for clean energy.     

The value of information: ‘Methodological Frontiers and New Applications for Realizing Social Benefit’ workshop

This report highlights the major conclusions and outcomes from a workshop held 28–29 June 2010 at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC, on methodological frontiers and new applications of valuing information and its social benefit. The participants provided answers to a series of questions: what is meant by “value of information”? When does information have value? What are state-of-the-practice methods to ascribe value to information? Participants also identified steps to ascribe, measure, and communicate value. The workshop included identification of five discrete approaches at the frontier of methodological advances: price- and cost-based derivation; Bayesian belief networks; regulatory cost-effectiveness evaluation; econometric modeling and estimation; and simulation modeling and estimation.     

The supply of space infrastructure: Issues in the theory and practice of estimating costs

Estimating the cost of space-based infrastructure is difficult for many reasons; ensuring accurate estimates is even more difficult given the tendency for contracting mechanisms to induce downward biases. This article first reviews the conceptual and empirical literature on cost estimation and associated contract design to highlight some of these problems. It then outlines possible approaches to ameliorating them.