Picture a vast field of solar panels, ranging in an unbroken array across nearly a square mile of land. Now shift that image into outer space, with the giant structure sitting tens of thousands of miles above Earth’s surface, and you have a sense of what space-based solar power seeks to achieve.
The drive for this energy source comes not just from its advantages over land-based solar, but also from characteristics that set it apart from most other energy sources.
Proponents say it can help power parts of the world that struggle to tap into more traditional forms of energy – either because of their remote location, or because the related infrastructure simply doesn’t exist.
“I’m very optimistic indeed,” says Martin Soltau, co-CEO and co-founder of Space Solar. “There are much more complicated robotics in space at the moment, like the Mars rover – we don’t need anything near as complicated as that.”
The idea of space-based solar is to harvest the sun’s energy far beyond the vagaries of our planet’s weather systems, and so high up that the solar panels’ view of the sun is almost never eclipsed.
