Streamlining Solar Energy Harvesting: Solar Energy Satellite Harvesting

Today, technology can bring solar energy production way above the world’s highest roof. 

Satellites have become the most efficient way to transmit telecommunications through microwaves across the planet.

Now today’s innovators are pushing technological boundaries to reach orbit and harvest solar energy outside the atmosphere.

We might have seen these ideas often happen in science fiction. However, it might only be a few decades until this idea becomes real. 

A significant number of investors believe that this technology can happen much sooner than we think. People have donated $100M to create the world’s first solar energy harvesting satellite.

The ideal scenario for satellite solar energy harvesting is the optimal collection of solar energy. 

The sun’s rays have to go through many filters through the atmosphere that reduces the ray’s total energy production. Thus, satellite solar energy harvesting allows the device to receive the full sunray brunt.

However, many challenges face this project. For example, solar energy cells can receive a limited solar energy amount only. Therefore, it requires high-capacity solar energy panels and storage cells.

Read more about this innovation and future technology in this post from Tech Crunch.

The Space-based Solar Power Project has been underway since at least 2013, when the first donation from Donald and Brigitte Bren came through. Donald Bren is the chairman of Irvine Company and on the Caltech board of trustees, and after hearing about the idea of space-based solar in Popular Science, he proposed to fund a research project at the university — and since then has given more than $100 million for the purpose. The source of the funds has been kept anonymous until this week, when Caltech made it public.

The idea emerges naturally from the current limitations of renewable energy. Solar power is ubiquitous on the surface, but of course highly dependent on the weather, season and time of day. No solar panel, even in ideal circumstances, can work at full capacity all the time, and so the problem becomes one of transferring and storing energy in a smart grid. No solar panel on Earth, that is.

A solar panel in orbit, however, may be exposed to the full light of the sun nearly all the time, and with none of the reduction in its power that comes from that light passing through the planet’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere.

“This ambitious project is a transformative approach to large-scale solar energy harvesting for the Earth that overcomes this intermittency and the need for energy storage,” said SSPP researcher Harry Atwater in the Caltech release.

Of course, you would need to collect enough energy that it’s worth doing in the first place, and you need a way to beam that energy down to the surface in a way that doesn’t lose most of it to the aforementioned protective layers but also doesn’t fry anything passing through its path.

These fundamental questions have been looked at systematically for the last decade, and the team is clear that without Bren’s support, this project wouldn’t have been possible. Attempting to do the work while scrounging for grants and rotating through grad students might have prevented its being done at all, but the steady funding meant they could hire long-term researchers and overcome early obstacles that might have stymied them otherwise. (Continued)

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