Power: The Second Biggest Hurdle a Mars Colony Faces

How much electricity cost on a Mars Colony will be one major factor in how fast it can grow

The biggest single obstacle to a Mars colony is transportation. It is a truism, the cheaper it is to ship, the more people that will send equipment and people there. This is your basic economic function. As the cost drops, the number of people willing to buy at the offered price rises, as does how much of the product they are willing to buy. Musk is hoping to drop that to the point that millions will be interested, if the other factors are there. One of those factors is power availability and cost.

What each watt-hour costs massively affects what equipment people and companies will send, how much of it, and what they plan on doing there with what they are sending. To maximize the amount of equipment investors are going to send, besides cheap shipping costs, you also need cheap, abundant power, with guarantees that it will stay plentiful and cheap. There is much debate on just how to do it. But as of yet, there is no one group of people seriously putting together any project that can meet that need. As it’s currently looking, each group investing there is going to need to provide their own power, be it solar, nuclear batteries, or micro nuclear power plants. The advantage of this is that it gives each control of their own supply.

But the disadvantages are great. More this option isn’t cheap. A very large part of your startup capital is required just for power setup. It isn’t very expandable. When you need to add more power, you are going to need to order more equipment from Earth, wait a long time for delivery, then install another power system; a costly and time-consuming process. Many investors will look at that disadvantage and say, no, not going to invest there, and any Mars colony will need all the investors it can get. But if they have to provide their own power, this could cut out 90% of them.

One solution is building some kind of lander around a large nuclear power plant and selling power just as current electrical companies do. Such a power plant should be able to handle the three biggest uses of power, methane oxygen fuel production, construction-remote charging and operation, and water harvesting and purification, with enough leftover to sell for residential use. But for significant light manufacturing, and for all the food and other biomass production, a second one may be necessary.

Ideally, these would be provided, and operated by, two entirely different companies with different designs. If construction and expansion are anywhere near the needed level, they or other companies coming there to compete in that market will need set down other power plants every launch window, with the newest, highest-load manufacturing building located the closest to them, with contacts that guarantee each plant a steady income.

Because face it, no one is going to invest in building nuclear plants that can be landed there unless they are being guaranteed a good income on them. Right now, not one company see it as worth their while to start doing the preliminary work that they would need to do. Building such a plant is going to take years. The most interest being shown now is, if we were going to do something like this, a version of this design would be how.

Building such large power plants that can be landed there or on the moon can be profitable, but a company could go bankrupt very easily trying. This is the largest reason you don’t have some already doing it. Unless underwritten by the government, there is a very good chance that no company will invest in such, and the colony will have to operate on smaller cheaper, less capable units, each owned by the people needing that power despite how inefficient that is and how much it increases cost. This at present, looks to be the most likely, and will slow down the development of any colony there.

But even if a government were willing to underwrite the development, and there are more than one who just may, such has every chance of having not only strings attached, but hooks too. They will have some say on who gets that power and at what price. Politics, especially earth politics, will dominate those decisions. Yet it does get more people to invest more money, time and effort, so is a trade-off that might be needed. There is no way around it. How much up front investment is needed for electricity, and how much of the production will go to paying for electric consumption will be major factors in who will invest and how much they will consider investing there.

Ideally, Musk and others should get together to offer contracts guaranteeing the purchase of X amount of electricity from two different companies, and be setting down those power plants before even the first manned mission, and the colony grow between the places they set down, with the first main tunnel connecting the two and everything else branching off that tunnel. The number of people with the ability to invest in Mars and willing to for the next launch window will be many times more than it would be without some similar set up. Besides cheap transportation, cheap power is a major factor in just how fast a Mars Colony can grow. It is going to be decades at the soonest before a colony has sufficient infrastructure to build its own plants, and ones that can be landed and go right into operation are likely to be the best bet. But who will start that, and when, is anyone’s guess at the present time.