Solar Energy

By Dr. Rashmi Mayur

Summary

This Forum of Free Enterprise pamphlet prints two articles — ‘Solar Energy’ (pp. 1–7) and ‘Space City & Solar Energy’ (pp. 8–11) — both drawn from a single public lecture delivered by Dr. Rashmi Mayur in Bombay on 3 July 1978. Mayur, then Director of the Urban Development Institute and a member of the Space City Project Council, frames the late 1970s as a unique moment in the earth’s 4.6-billion-year history: human technological civilisation has in two million years become a force on the scale of geological change, and every fragment of that civilisation runs on a single substrate — energy. With conventional fossil reserves projected to be exhausted by about 2010 A.D., and with 90% of India’s 625 million people living an unrelieved ‘energy crisis’ while Americans consume a hundred times more energy per head, the lecture turns to alternatives.

Mayur surveys the options open to India and finds each lacking on its own. Coal reserves are large but badly located and dirty, requiring 500 Mwe coal-fired plants whose ash produces 20,000 truckloads of ash and serious health hazards. Hydro could meet only 60% of demand even if fully developed. Nuclear power is capital-intensive, dependent on imported uranium (8 tons of it ordered from the United States by President Carter on 28 April 1978), and slow to scale — India has three reactors to the United States’s sixty. Oil must be imported at ruinous cost. He settles on solar energy as the most promising long-term source for a ‘country of the sun’ with 260 clear days a year, citing Dr. Peter Glasser’s satellite-mounted solar plant due by 1985 and listing a nine-point catalogue of immediate village-level applications: solar pumping, crop drying, water distillation, biogas slurry, mini-power plants of 5–50 kW, solar heaters and collectors, space cooking, ice-making, and bio-conversion of waste to fuel.

The second article extends the argument beyond the planet. With world population heading toward 6.5–7 billion by 2000 A.D. and India alone approaching 950 million by century’s end, Mayur insists that ‘the limits of the planet cannot be the limits to India’s development.’ He reports the proposal — pursued by Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill of Princeton University — to build the first orbital city of 10,000 people by 2005 A.D. for about $10 billion, with construction material drawn from the moon and asteroids. The space-city would spin at 2 r.p.m. to simulate gravity, hold weather artificially constant, and beam solar electricity back to earth at less than 10% of the cost of terrestrial generation. He frames this not as escapism but as a moral frontier for a humanity in which two-thirds need not remain poor, closing with the Russian writer Tsiolkowsky’s prophecy that humans will one day ‘conquer the whole of solar space.‘

Key points

• Frames the late 1970s as a unique moment in earth’s history because human technological civilisation has, in two million years, become a planetary-scale geological force.

• Treats energy as the universal substrate of life and civilisation, making the supply of energy the master problem of the age.

• Reports a stark per-capita disparity: Americans consume roughly 100 times more energy per head than an average Indian farmer, while 90% of 625 million Indians live a permanent ‘energy crisis’.

• Projects exhaustion of conventional fossil reserves by 2010 A.D. and argues coal, hydro, nuclear and oil each fail on their own to bridge the gap for India.

• Champions solar energy as the most promising perennial, non-polluting source for India, which receives an average of 260 clear days a year.

• Cites Dr. Peter Glasser’s satellite solar-power plant (industrial application expected by 1985) and offers a nine-point list of village-scale solar applications already feasible in India.

• Extends the argument to space colonisation, reporting Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill’s Princeton-led proposal to build a 10,000-person orbital city by 2005 A.D. for about $10 billion.

• Closes by framing the space-city as a moral frontier — a route by which two-thirds of humanity need not remain poor — and invokes Tsiolkowsky to predict humanity’s eventual conquest of solar space.

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