Praise the sun for it may be the answer to all our energy needs. It sounds too good to be true, but researchers are now working on harvesting the sun’s energy from space and beaming it back to Earth using microwaves, but it may not happen until at least 2035.
Martin Soltau, the co-chairman at Space Energy Initiative (SEI), says that the project, a collaboration between industry and academics, is quite possible.
How It Would Work
The project is called Cassiopeia and plans to use a constellation of very large satellites in a high Earth orbit. These satellites would harvest energy from the sun and send it back to Earth.
Soltau claims that this could supply all of the world’s energy and that its potential is almost unlimited. He says:
There’s sufficient room in orbit for the solar power satellites, and the Sun’s supply of energy is vast. A narrow strip around geostationary Earth orbit receives more than 100 times the amount of energy per year than all of humanity is forecast to use in 2050.
The UK government announced a £3 million funding round for space-based solar power (SBSP) projects once a study concluded that such a solution is viable. SEI is hoping to acquire a significant portion of this funding.
The satellites in this project would be made out of hundreds of thousands of identical modules that will be produced on Earth but would be assembled by autonomous robots in space. These robots would also be responsible for repairing and maintaining these satellites.
Sending Power to The Earth
The energy collected from these machines would be converted into high-frequency radio waves and beamed to an antenna on Earth, which would convert these waves into electricity. Each satellite could send up to a whopping 2 gigawatts of power into the grid, which is the equivalent of a nuclear power station.
But as mentioned earlier, the technology is still in the early stages of development and it may not be a thing until at least 2035.
Its a very good idea to create energy in space,i was also thinking about it.