Homeowners want an affordable way to have electrical energy, and solar technologies make it possible. There are solar panels that can power entire homes and factories. Renowned roofing manufacturer GAF has built Timberline Solar Shingles that rival Tesla’s solar shingles in performance.
The rapid progress of solar technology is evident everywhere. However, the future of solar energy will be in space, shingles, and solar panels. Many countries with solar farms believe that using transmission satellites fitted with multiple solar panels is the future – and they’ll be correct.
Coal and fossil energy production currently have a dwindling supply and global challenges. Solar panels use available sunlight during clear weather to operate. In doing so, it takes renewable energy technologies by a huge mile, ensuring zero pollution. Their only issue is recyclability, which is seeing slow but guaranteed progress to date.
Still, the world will inevitably turn from fossil to a solar-powered economy soon. Rising prices of oil and gas are catalysts of solar energy research, which brings us to the European Space Agency looking for ways to harvest solar energy from space. Learn more about it from this Space.com post.
The European Space Agency will ask its member states to fund a preparatory space-based solar power program at a major meeting later this year.
The Solaris program would explore the potential of space-based solar power (SBSP) generation to provide clean energy and contribute to decarbonization by working with European industry to assess technical feasibility, benefits, implementation options, commercial opportunities and risks of the emerging technology.
SBSP involves collecting solar energy with huge solar arrays in geostationary orbit, an orbit at the altitude of 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) where satellites appear suspended above a fixed spot on Earth. Without the obstruction by Earth’s atmosphere, space-based solar power plants would generate energy more efficiently than Earth-based plants, and beam it to the ground for conversion into electricity.
ESA describes the Solaris program as a response to the current climate change crisis on Earth and a potential source of clean, affordable, continuous, abundant and secure energy. A decision on moving ahead with a European SBSP development program would be made by 2025, the agency said in a statement(opens in new tab).
“Space-based solar power would be an important step towards carbon neutrality and energy independence for Europe,” ESA’s director general Josef Aschbacher tweeted(opens in new tab) on Aug. 16. “Two recent independent studies strongly recommend investments to advance the SBSP technologies needed to address our growing energy crisis.”
The two cost versus benefit studies on “Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) for terrestrial energy needs” were completed earlier this month.
“We have the main building blocks already, but let me be clear: for the project to succeed, much technology development and funding is still needed,” Aschbacher wrote(opens in new tab).
The Solaris proposal will be put forward at the ESA Council of Ministers in November, but how much funding is being sought is not known. The ultimate goal of SBSP would be to aid Europe’s transition to a net zero carbon world by 2050.
The concept of SBSP first emerged in the 1960s but has recently become of great interest to a number of countries. The U.K. expressed its interest in an SBSP system earlier this year, while China is planning in-orbit tests(opens in new tab) before the end of the decade as a stepping stone to a gigawatt-level system by mid-century. (Continue reading here to learn more)
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