At this week’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai, there’s one climate mitigation strategy that’s not likely to be widely discussed. That’s unfortunate because the idea of harvesting solar energy from orbit and beaming it back to Earth has been around since the late 1960s. That’s when American aerospace engineer Peter Glaser first put forth the notion of harnessing the Sun’s radiation from space.
It all makes sense. The average solar flux in space is five times greater than even the sunniest locations on Earth. In 1968, if humanity had taken Glaser’s idea and run with it, climate change would likely be just a blip on the radar, and we would have more energy than we could ever have imagined.
But finally, a major player —- the European Space Agency —- is taking the idea seriously and has funded a feasibility study to put a constellation of space-based solar satellites in orbit by 2040.
