It sounds too good to be true, but we could see energy being beamed down from outer space to power our homes.
Just recently in March, the UK government announced that they are considering building a $16 billion space-based solar power plant as a part of their goals to reach net zero by 2050. They’re thinking of creating a satellite that will beam energy down from orbit which we can use here on Earth’s surface. But you may be asking: can this even work? What are the drawbacks? So without further ado, let’s look at the potential of space-based solar.
An illustration of a possible system. (Credit: John Mankins/Artemis Innovation Management Solutions)
Every hour, more solar energy hits the Earth than humanity uses in a year, but thirty per cent of this is reflected by the atmosphere and clouds. So whilst we still have access to an incredible amount of power on the surface, it’s far, far less than what we can achieve. This isn’t even accounting for how commercial solar panels only manage to use around 15–20% of the energy they capture.
However, in space, there is no atmosphere, clouds or nighttime to worry about; a space-based solar system can have basically unlimited access to the Sun, enabling it to generate magnitudes more power than we are used to from solar. The general way these satellites work is by reflecting light with large mirrors onto a smaller solar collection area, and then it is transmitted in a safe and controllable way. Currently, there are two main transmission concepts: laser transmission and microwave transmission.
As you probably inferred, laser-transmitting satellites use laser beams to send energy back to Earth. These satellites would also be relatively cheaper and easier to build and launch as they are smaller and orbit at lower heights, but this comes at the cost of reduced power generation (approx. 1–10 megawatts per satellite) thus requiring a swarm of satellites and the fact that it can be easily obstructed by …….