Space-Based Solar Farms Will Soon Trap the Sun's Energy and Beam It Down to Earth

Most of the ways we presently satisfy those needs have to do with burning harmful stuff. We know this too, and over the past few decades a lot of us down here, individuals and organizations, have begun looking for cleaner ways to generate power.

One of the most widespread such ways is now the use of solar farms, large fields of solar panels that can capture the energy the Sun sends our way and turn it into something useful. For all their merits, though, solar panels have a lot of shortcomings, the biggest of which being the fact they're utterly useless in cloudy weather and during nighttime.

Sci-fi writers have long toyed with the idea of deploying solar panels in orbit to avoid all that. After all, they are already used to power our spacecraft, and they could most definitely be used to power things here on Earth. If only someone found a proper way to capture solar power and beam it down.

To our knowledge, and despite the many space exploration programs now being cooked up all over the world, few are really working on something like this. This week, that small list grew a little bigger, after we learned of the European Space Agency (ESA) embarking not on one, but on two distinct such projects.

The effort is part of something called Solaris. That would be a larger project approved last year and meant to “prepare the ground for a possible decision in 2025 on a full development programme by establishing the technical, political and programmatic viability of Space-Based Solar Power for terrestrial clean energy needs.”

As part of Solaris the space agency announced this week two concept studies for these orbital solar farms are to be conducted, one by consulting firm Arthur D Little and the other by Italian space company Thales Alenia. Both are to submit their ideas and vision of space-based solar power plants by the end of the year.

One crucial aspect of these concepts will be of course the way in which collected solar power will be sent to Earth. It's unclear at this point which method will be used but at the time of writing several of them are on the table, including radio frequency transmission, lasers, and even simple reflection.

Europe is not the only party interested in coming up with way of harnessing the Sun's power in space, around the clock, for use here on Earth. Earlier in January, American Caltech launched the Space Solar Power Demonstrator satellite, while Japan and China plan to follow suit in 2025 and 2028, respectively.

The Europeans seem to be the most determined to make this work, though, and they've set the pace and milestones of the Solaris project as if it were a “flight program.” That's because, ESA says, “results will dictate the follow-on studies planned for a sub-scale demonstrator mission as well as research projects into specific key technologies that SOLARIS will support.”