Pentagon Backs Ambitious Plan to Beam Solar Power From Space
Trump Says South Korea Deal Includes $8.4 Billion U.S.
Oil Project Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… Space-based solar power just got another powerful vote of confidence.
The United States Department of Defense just inked a contract with solar energy company Overview Energy to “design, build, and test a homing beacon that will enable its space-based solar energy system to accurately beam power from orbit to receiving solar arrays on Earth,” according to a brand newreportfrom Interesting Engineering.
The idea is that solar panels would orbit the Earth, collecting sunlight straight from the source and then beaming it back down to Earth either through powerful lasers or microwave beams, depending on thetechnologybeing applied.
Putting solar panels into outer space would yield a litany of benefits.
Critically, unlike terrestrial models, the sun would never set on these solar panels, allowing them to generate clean energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
This would solve an enormous issue in the clean energy sector, which is seeing increasing instances of wasted energy and even negative energy prices as peak production hours and peak demand hours are inevitably misaligned, and energy storage capacities have lagged far behind productive capacity.
And intermittency is not the only major challenge to the traditional solar power sector that space-based solar would be able to sidestep completely.
Industrial-scale solar farms take up enormous tracts of land, and are therefore facing increasing legal challenges to secure appropriate plots for development.
A single large-scale solar farm can take up thousands of acres.
According to a 2022insight reportfrom strategy & management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, utility-scale solar farms require ten times as much space per unit of power as coal- or natural gas–fired power plants, at minimum.
And that’s counting the land used to produce and transport the fossil fuels.
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|---|---|---|
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| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
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