How's that coming along?
https://eepower.com/news/pge-start-up-solaren-corp-plan-to-beam-solar-power-from-space/
Oh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaren
" Solaren has since announced that the contract with PG&E has been forgone"
This is just Space Nuttery. Never, ever, EVER, going to work. Strictly sci-fi.
Some sci-fi comes true. Sadly usually only the dystopian ones.
Because they don't need warp drive and tritanium...
Someone wants public subsidy money.
Look at the ROI, and if the full lifecycle cost is greater than earth-based solutions, fuck 'em.
Is this the microwave power from space idea again? /wcgw…
lol, what an insane idea...
A physical cable back to Earth is impossible, otherwise we'd already have space elevators.
Any other wireless transmission would have all the same weather problems and energy losses, it would be WAY cheaper to just build more solar panels on the ground.
The solar panel is easy, it's the cable run that's a real bitch
Yeah, sending it wirelessly would have massive loss, probably around 90%+
Are they really losses when the leaking, unfocused energy turns all buildings in a kilometer radius into microwave ovens? Just fill them up with popcorn packets and invite everyone over for movie night. We could watch one of the James Bond movies where the villain has an orbital deathray. I think there's at least a couple of them.
I saw this documentary about a device that can concentrate solar energy, called a "Solex Agitator." The project went sideways when this guy, who looked an awful lot like Christopher Lee, stole the prototype and tried to sell it to the highest bidder.
The British government somehow got involved and sent a spy to...
Wait... maybe that wasn't a documentary.
It's less about the loss and more about the space required for the receiver and the environmental hazard
That, and wiping off the caked dust.
Countries will do everything except build nuclear power plants ig.
Don't feed the troll
Renewables are going so hard, it's not even a competition anymore
Or make more use of renewables. Nuclear has never been cost-efficient, it's just that the costs have been buried in state subsidies to the industry and its supply chain.
Nuclear has never been cost-efficient, it's just that the costs have been buried in state subsidies to the industry and its supply chain.
A lie repeated again and again.
French Cour des Comptes has released a report, back in 2012, the costs of the french nuclear fleet, everything included: 121 billions of euros between 1960 and 2010.
2,4 billions a year. To provide decarbonized and reliable electricity for decades.
To put in perspective, Germany is more than a trillion of euros in for their Energiewende, or about 40 billions of euros a year for ~25 years, and they still have one of the costliest and dirtiest electricity or Europe, while still not being close to stop coal and having no plan to get out of gas.
And for more perspective, EDF had 118 billions of dollars of revenues in 2024, mostly coming from nuclear, and 11 billions of net results, including the payback of the interests of the debt that the french government imposed on EDF.
Anyone claiming nuclear has never been or can’t be profitable or cost-efficient is either uneducated or a liar.
When done right, nuclear is profitable as fuck, that's empirically proved.
That might have been true in the past, but right now renewable energy is by far cheaper and faster to build than nuclear energy. (Just look into the final end user prices they produce)
As I believe you are German or at least can read it: here is something well written to read https://quellen.tv/energie#aber-frankreich2025
Also there is more to Germany having costly electricity than not building nuclear power plants as you make it to be.
but right now renewable energy is by far cheaper and faster to build than nuclear energy.
No. Building a solar or wind plant is cheaper and faster than building a nuclear plant, sure, but that's not what we're aiming for. The goal is to decarbonize electricity by phasing out fossils.
Replacing all fossil-based electricity production nationwide is quite cheap for nuclear when done right (e.g. France, planning for decades and multiple reactors at once, while actually politically supporting your industry, instead of throwing a project once in a while and letting it fight in courts by itself against NIMBY and anti-nuclears).
Replacing fossils with solar and wind power is science fiction. There is not a single country in the world that has decarbonized its electricity without significant decarbonized and controllable electricity capacities, or to name them: hydro or nuclear. Except that you just can't build hydro anywhere, and most countries' capacities are limited.
You can't claim that solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear, because solar and wind just can't do what nuclear can, and can at best be complementary to other controllable power sources.
This article feels like AI, generated from one sentence.
Might as well just start building the dyson sphere instead
So could a fucking Dyson sphere. This article is PopMech-tier speculative trash. A flying car in every driveway, any day now since the 1960s…
This is an idea from the 1960s back when they thought solar panels would be like computer chips and remain super expensive in terms of area but become exponentially better at the amount of sunlight they could convert into electricity.
It makes absolutely zero sense to spend billions of dollars putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back to earth now that they are so cheap per unit area. The one thing you could argue a space based solar array could do would be to stretch out the day length so you need less storage, but that's easier to accomplish using long electrical cables.
This energy would then be transmitted to one or more stations on Earth. It is then converted to electricity and delivered to the energy grid or batteries for storage.
How is the energy transmitted to Earth?
And keep in mind that, if they don't do it, the sun transmits energy to the earth for free.
Yeah this article is severely lacking in any concrete details.
I'd also like to know how exactly it is that they plan to deploy massive arrays of solar panels to space. Most earth-based solar farms are huge and take up entire fields, some are a few kilometres across in size. That's many orders of magnitude more massive than anything we've previously ever launched.
Plus whatever power transmission system they come up with would have to be powerful to be of any use but if it's that powerful would present an active danger and would effectively constitute a space-based weapon system.
It's a cool sci-fi idea but it is all pie in the sky.
Back of the napkin math:
Largest solar sail (much lighter than panels, but doesn't produce electricity) 2000 sq meters
200w/sq meter
400kwp
Also iirc the space solar farms plans I've seen call for re radiating the energy back via microwaves to dedicated receiving towers on the ground
Now factor in the launch costs, and make sure to include the probability of launch and deployment failures.
Yeah I've seen that. Microwave power beaming would work in theory it's just electromagnetic radiation after all. But the vast majority of it is going to get absorbed by water molecules, because that's what microwave radiation does, that's why it cooks your food.
They're probably going to bake a lot of seagulls as well.
I think climate change mitigation can be the next scam after AI. Once AI bubble bursts they will start looking for new investments and I think climate change is ready to start generating profits. People are desperate enough to start investing money in things that will limit effect of climate change. Who will profit? Corporation that will work on those projects. Anything space related (solar panels in space, geoengineering) will require Space X/Blue Origin. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are already invested in nuclear fusion and modular reactors. Tesla is an energy provider. Any CO2 sequestration projects will require new startups, obviously backed by the same corporations. My guess is very soon we will see governments paying those companies to solve the problem they created. Even more money will be pumped to the 1%. It went form "climate change isn't real", to "climate change isn't caused by humans", to "it is caused by humans but nothing can be done about it". Next step will be "we can fix it if you pay us".
The scammers are already all over it like flies on shit.
Pay to win is always the default in corporate world.
This energy would then be transmitted to one or more stations on Earth.
And how do you suppose to do that?
Beam the power from space like they do in Mirai Shounen Conan? Or space shuttles with batteries? Or a giant cable that somehow doesn't break?
It's not possible.
Naw, you just beam it back to earth as a laser. That way you could highjack the signal and fill a house with popcorn kernals a to start a huge neighborhood block party.
Deathray!
Feasible? Only time will tell. Possible? Caltech did it two years ago. Look up MAPLE. Wireless energy transfer to/from space was achieved.
At what scale? Milliwatts? Watts? On cloudy days?
This seems very much to fall into the "technically" possible, but impossible to scale realm.
RD1 generates power 99% of the year and collects solar radiation by autonomously redirecting its reflectors toward a concentrator to focus sunlight throughout each day. RD2 uses flat panels, with solar cells facing away from Earth and microwave emitters facing toward the Earth. RD2 generates power 60% of the year due to its limited capability to reposition itself or redirect solar radiation toward its solar cells.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230017756/downloads/ASCEND%20SBSP%20Final%2005162024.pdf
Microwaves or even Masers. This is nothing new, lot's of studies and experiments. It's not infeasible, efficiency not that bad either. But solarpanles on earth have only advantages, especially integrated in roofs or walls.
solar panels on earth could reduce it 100%
All fun and games until a piece of space junk knocks into the satellite and you accidentally cut through the Dutch sea wall.
I think this was one of the possible disasters that could happen in Sim City 2000
There would absolutely have to be safety measures on this to avoid that exact scenario from occurring. I cannot remember the author of the book right offhand, but there's a book called PowerSat that goes through something very similar to this. As long as the beam is diffuse and not incredibly focused, it should be fine if something flies through it like a bird or if the beam gets knocked off course, it wouldn't damage infrastructure. There would also need to be good auto cut off functionality built into the thing so that if it realized it was off target, maybe by like a focusing laser or something, it would automatically shut itself down.
Fusion would be much more practical than beaming back power from space. I think the chance of seeing either of those by 2050 is about 0%.
Fusion does not exist and wouldn't be in time if we started buildong commercial plants today. Low lead time is the only shot we have.
Space based solar has already been demonstrated, but will not provide substantial power since the receiver is basically a giant solar array and dead zone where life gets toasted.
Or just provide more subsidies for solar panels at residential home roofs
Solar energy gathered in space is less likely to be affected by cloud cover and is safe from natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes
You don't say. However I suspect that the chance of being hit by a micrometeorite is significantly higher.
Here’s the paper from NASA that this is based on.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230017756/downloads/ASCEND%20SBSP%20Final%2005162024.pdf
that's some easier said than done statement there
Wouldn't that bring more solar energy to earth and contribute to energy imbalance?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
