UK-based company Space Solar is partnering with Reykjavik Energy and Icelandic sustainability initiative Transition Labs to develop a space-based solar power plant that can deliver about 30 megawatts of electricity – potentially enough to power between 1,500 and 3,000 homes – from 2030. The system will collect sunlight in space through solar panels and then transmit it as radio waves at a specific frequency to a ground station, where it will be converted to electricity for the grid.
The satellite is expected to be scalable and quite big. Even if a full version of their CASSIOPeiA power array is not built, we are talking about the heaviest single object in space that is not a space station, and when all the arrays are splayed out, much larger than the International Space Station.
The company aims to have a scaled-up version of the system in space by 2036, which would supply gigawatts of electricity.
The Soviets tried this before; not explicitly for power but for lighting.
… everyone gets solar power from space.
Question, if electricity can be transmitted as a radio signal, why could we generate power here on earth in areas where renewables are super abundant (turbines in the ocean, giant waterfalls, deserts for solar, et cetera) and transmit that around the earth to areas where it’s needed? Why does it have to be in space for this to work?
Also, can someone please explain how the fuck we wirelessly transmit electricity, and how it’s different from the Tesla thing?
Think of transmitting power using a lightbulb and a solar panel. The tesla method was beaming its power in all directions, like a lightbulb, so a solar panel placed elsewhere would only be catching a tiny amount of the transmitted power. Very inefficient. So instead, we use something more like a laser- we get a collumnated beam of energy we can send straight to our panel, which is much less wasteful. Of course, actually using a laser and a solar panel aren’t ideal because they’re both pretty inefficient, so we use a lower frequency we can work with more efficiently, like microwaves. We still incur some heavy losses doing this though. This also explains why we don’t beam power away from areas with plentiful renewables, line losses in normal grids makes exporting energy to somewhere across the globe infeasible, and the costs of enough space infrastructure to beam power around are way higher than the low return you’d be able to get by converting energy to microwaves and back twice. In fact, the inefficiencies from this process are bad enough that it already makes space based solar economically challenging. Maybe when starship becomes operational and launch costs drop another order of magnitude, it’ll be viable, but until then I think our photovoltiacs are better placed on the ground.
Given their abundance of geothermal energy (they keep their footpaths ice-free year round and still have enough to power energy-hungry facilities such as aluminium smelters and data centres), Iceland is probably the country that least needs this.
Most of Iceland’s energy usage is from geothermal sources, but only about a quarter of the electricity is. They do a lot of direct heating with it, literally just heating up a whole bunch of water and running that hot water through pipes to houses and pavements and such, rather than having electricity-powered heating elements everywhere. Most of their electricity production is from hydro though, so it’s still very clean
They had these in a game I used to play, I wanna say Sim City 2000? It was called a microwave power plant and I think occasionally the beam coming to Earth would miss the power plant and start a fire, but my memory’s a bit fuzzy.
First space death ray confirmed. Exciting news!
Edit:
No, the system by design cannot be used as or converted into a weapon.
The aperture size of transmitter and receiving antenna are sized to keep the maximum beam intensity at or below 245 W/m2. This is only one quarter of the intensity of sunlight at midday, which is around 1,000 W/m2.
Lacking a common power bus, it would not be possible to re-purpose the power distributed across the platform to power a separate laser or particle weapon.
The aperture size of transmitter and receiving antenna are sized to keep the maximum beam intensity at or below 245 W/m2. This is only one quarter of the intensity of sunlight at midday, which is around 1,000 W/m2.
So it could be testing the feasability of the next sattelite that will be a weapon with a different aperture size.
- capture light in space
- shine light down to earth
- capture light on earth
- sell electricity for profit
simple as
Yeah im curious about it but it sounds like lossy-er solar farming… Perhaps its about surface area and around the clock availability?
Now i imagine pirate power radiostations…
Yeah im curious about it but it sounds like lossy-er solar farming… Perhaps its about surface area and around the clock availability?
Presumably. Just the ability to run it at maximum efficiency for 24 hours would probably more than cancel out conversion losses.
So i should start building my free energy pirate station soon? :p
I would be surprised if they manage to make it work at that scale.
The company aims to have a scaled-up version of the system in space by 2036, which would supply gigawatts of electricity.
by 2036? We are all dead by then…
That sounds absolutely insane, maybe its April 1st in iceland?
inb4 “ackshully…”
