Space-Based Solar Power is Dead
Image: NASA
Solar power arrays, in orbit around Earth, beaming energy down to us, clean and abundant, 24/7. It sounds great. The idea is called space-based solar power. I made a video about this a year ago that I thought was kind of critical. But two recent reports have put my critical thinking to shame. They’ve basically killed the idea, and not in a fun laser beam from space kind of way. Let’s have a look.
Governments all over the planet have been scraping the bottoms of their barrels for the next crazy idea that’s going to save us from climate change. Space-based solar power is one of the things they found down there, right next to old banana peels and lint balls. It’s an idea from the 1970s, but in the past years, several groups of engineers have put forward new designs for solar power stations in orbit.
The basic concept is to put sunlight collectors into space, convert the energy into a microwave beam and send that to a receiver station on the surface of our planet. The major difficulty is that the station has to simultaneously collect light from the sun and aim the beam at the receiver station. This requires the parts of the power plant to be movable. Most designs opt for a swarm of collectors that must be coordinated which sounds like a really good idea and certainly isn’t going to increase the space junk problem at all.
In total, these power plants are typically a few kilometers in extension weigh several thousand tons.
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