‘Building the solar power farm in space would take more than 60 rocket flights and a team of robot builders – but it’s one step closer to being a reality. A company hoping to launch the first solar farm into space has passed a critical milestone with a prototype on Earth.
Oxfordshire-based Space Solar plans to power more than a million homes by the 2030s with mile-wide complex of mirrors and solar panels orbiting 22,000 miles above the planet.
But its super-efficient design for harvesting constant sunlight – called CASSIOPeiA – requires the system to rotate towards the sun, whatever its position, while still sending power to a fixed receiver on the ground.
That’s now been shown to work for the first time at Queen’s University Belfast, with a wireless beam successfully “steered” across a lab to turn on a light.
Martin Soltau, the company’s founder, told Sky News in an exclusive interview: “This is a world first. You can get constant energy all the time. This is really going to have a substantial impact on our future energy systems“‘
