If you're watching this little video message on the day of publication which is Boxing
Day 2021 then I'll entirely understand if you're gazing slightly blankly at the screen
through a foggy haze of holiday overindulgence! In view of that I thought today would probably not
be the day to blow your mind with some ultra complicated scientific laboratory research
involving words that I had to practice 20 times before I could pronounce them correctly. No, what
I thought I'd do instead is bring you a flight of pure science fiction fantasy, or at least that's
what it looks like at first sight anyway. What I'm talking about here is... power stations in space!
Hello, Merry Christmas, and welcome to Just Have a Think.
Scientists and science fiction writers have been dreaming about beaming energy back down to the
planet from orbiting power stations for decades. The concept was allegedly first considered by a
Russian scientist called Konstantine Tsiolovsky in the 1920s. Since then the likes of Isaac Asimov
and Arthur C Clarke have also offered their visions of how such systems might work.
More recently though some pretty serious proper research has been going on in places like the U.S,
Europe, Japan and China to actually bring a power station in space into reality. Renewables like
wind and solar are becoming ever more important contributors to our grid systems and energy
storage is helping with the intermittency problem, but our modern societies need guaranteed 24 7
power all year round, and that's where scientists are hoping that an orbiting solar power station
could play a role. Solar panels in space receive direct sunlight with none of the degradation from
the earth's atmosphere and weather systems that panels suffer from down here on the surface of the
planet, and satellite orbits can be programmed to ensure they're constantly receiving full sunlight.
That's the good news. The slightly trickier part is constructing something large enough to generate
a useful level of energy, then working out how to get all that infrastructure up into space
and coming up with a safe and reliable system for beaming all the energy back down to the surface
without taking out half of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite arrays or accidentally straying off
target and vaporizing a small town next to one of the giant terrestrial receivers! It's reckoned
that to be cost effective a single solar power station would have to be about five square miles
or 10 square kilometres in area. That's about the size of 1400 football pitches, which is an awful
lot of rocket launches. Making each component as light as possible will obviously be key to
maximizing how much each of those launches can take up into orbit. In 2017 researchers
at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, demonstrated a prototype solar panel
tile weighing just 280 grams per square metre, which is about the weight of a piece of card.
Another team at the University of Liverpool are exploring new manufacturing techniques
for printing ultralight solar cells onto foldable solar sails, which they say could one day
be manufactured using 3d printers and deployed directly from the International Space Station.
But the real challenge is how to get the power from space into our terrestrial electricity grids.
The basic idea, say the scientists, is to convert the energy collected by the orbiting solar panels
into electromagnetic radiation which can then be transmitted wirelessly back down to earth
via streams of microwaves. All of which sounds perfectly rational
and not at all bat***t crazy! It may astonish you to learn though that the science bods have
come up against some significant technical issues that are yet to be fully resolved. First of all
the further you transmit a beam of microwaves the more the microwaves tend to spread out and weaken.
Plus the beam would need to be constantly hitting a precise area on the earth's surface so that
a receiver could catch it and convert its energy back into electricity for the grid.
We do already have satellites in geosynchronous orbit of course, they're used for meteorological
and communication functions, but they orbit at about 36 000 kilometres above the planet's surface
which is an awfully long way for a concentrated beam of energy to travel. And with all that spread
and dissipation I talked about earlier you'd need a receiver the size of a small city to capture it
all. So the most promising option currently being pursued by researchers around the world is to
send up a swarm of thousands of small synchronous satellites to form a single large solar generator.
Logistically speaking that's actually not unlike the 40,000 satellites that SpaceX are
currently deploying for Starlink, so in theory that part of the equation is already doable.
Each solar panel satellite would send its energy to the same target area on earth via a laser beam
during its orbital pass, with the synchronized array ensuring a constant flow of energy 24
7. A laser has the advantage of having a very concentrated beam which is much less likely to
spread out over distance compared to microwaves, so although it wouldn't be quite as effective at
cutting through the earth's atmosphere it would most likely provide a more accurate and focused
transfer of energy, and that means the receiver back on earth could be much smaller as well.
Now you might think that something so monumental and fundamental to the future prosperity of the
human species and therefore potentially to all the other species on the planet
would have invoked some sort of non-political non-competitive globally coordinated effort
combining all the greatest scientific minds from each country to produce a single exemplary
design incorporating the very best cutting edge technology that we could muster as a species for
the good of all life on earth. And of course if that's how our geopolitical system actually worked
then we probably wouldn't have got ourselves into this climate crisis in the first place would we?
What's actually developing is a frantic race between the superpowers to be the first to get a
system up and running in order to achieve overall dominance of the global supply of energy from
space. Our friends in China appear to have been first off the mark with this 2015 research paper
submitted to Science Direct outlining their concept for a solar space power station
which they called Omega. By the end of 2019 they'd already claimed to be testing a prototype system
and in August 2021 it was announced that they planned to launch a fleet of mile-long solar
panels into space by 2035 to beam energy back to earth as part of what they say is their effort
to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. Once the array is fully operational, which could take until 2050,
it's estimated it should be capable of supplying two gigawatts of power
into China's grid at peak performance, which is massive! If you wanted to produce that amount
of power using solar panels on earth you'd need more than six million of them. In 2020
the European Space Agency launched a campaign to find the best proposals to tackle the space
power challenge here with the best ideas getting funding for development. 85 different designs were
submitted, 16 of them have been invited for follow-up and four have already been invited
to submit a co-funded research proposal, so expect to see some progress there in 2022.
Over in the States the team at Caltech received a hundred million dollars
in funding back in August 2021 for their space power station project. They're going for that
modular system of multiple satellites each of which will be several tens of metres in length,
all orbiting in close formation and operating in sync with each other as I outlined earlier.
The team hasn't actually worked out how to collect enough energy to make the venture worthwhile yet
but they're very optimistic that they'll crack that nut and they're also working on the best way
to get that laser beam of energy back to earth without losing most of it on the way.
None of these little wrinkles seem to have diminished the ambition of the project though.
Co-director Ali Hajimiri reckons Caltech will be launching demonstrators into space
in the first quarter of 2023! And then there's a U.S space commercialization
company called Red Wire who, in February 2021, acquired Deployable Space Systems, or DSS,
a leading supplier of solar arrays and structures for space missions.
They're looking at using colossal mirror-like solar reflectors to concentrate solar energy
onto their orbital solar panels which again will be beamed down to earth by a microwave or laser.
But perhaps the most important question of all is do space-based solar power stations
have the potential to help the world reduce carbon emissions by at least 45 percent by 2030, which is
what the IPCC tells we need to do? And the answer to that question is - no, don't be ridiculous.
Could it play a significant role in the global energy infrastructure of our children and
grandchildren's future though? Well, maybe. And if we did ever manage to convince our wise and
noble leaders to wind their necks in and actually cooperate for the greater good of humanity and
every other species on earth then perhaps spending eye-watering amounts of money on space power
stations might just be a better use of resources than some of our other even more delusional
projects. like for example attempting to colonise Mars! That's it for this Christmas week. I'm
taking a short break for New Year so there'll be no video next week but I'll be back on Sunday the
9th of January to kick off our 2022 voyage of climate and sustainable technology discoveries.
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have a very happy and peaceful new year and remember to just have a think. See you next year.