Beaming Solar Energy From Space Takes a Big Step Forward
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No matter where you are on earth, at any given moment, there are thousands of satellites zooming by overhead, almost twelve thousand of them as of october or twenty twenty three, according to the united nations office for outer space affairs. And a lot of satellites are constantly beaming things back to the ground, like images, weather, data.

You might even be streaming .

this podcast thanks to a satellite, believe this, a five star of you on your favor. But there's one particular satellite in orbit that's trying to figure out something new. It's running experiments for scientists at caltech who think there may be a way to be back, not just information, but energy, solar power from space.

Instead of discovering giant areas with solar collectors, you could beat the energy in a more intense way and get the energy exactly where you need.

That's journalist coy s. power. He wrote about the satellite and its experiments for the wall street journal.

In space, the sun is always shining. You get your energy twenty four or seven, so you can have solar in space and solar on the ground. And they actually worked together really nicely. IT could be the solar energy that never shuts down .

from the wall street journal. This is the future of everything. I'm dana Lewis. And while that sounds like something ripped from science fiction, orry says the early results from these experiments have been promising, meaning one day new technology being tested out above our planet could help deliver completely wireless power from space being directly to earth. Stick up.

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Corry, we're finally at a point now where, after decades, ground based solar is really starting to take off. So why collect solar power from space?

The big chAllenge, ed, with renewables, with both solar and wind, is their independent nature. You have day and night, you have clouds. You have times when the wind isn't blowing.

So you need what's called baseload power. You need some energy that's going all the time. So whenever you plugging into your well socket, there's energy there.

Whenever industry needs IT, there's energy there. That's the appeal. Space, space, solar power, it's clean, continuous energy from space that's always on in principle, you can be at anywhere on earth. So if you want to send IT to an emergency zone or disaster zone, if you want to send IT to a rural area that's completely off the grid, or if you want to send IT to a combat zone, for instance, you can just redirect your power beam from space. And all the sudden you have essentially a power plant where there was .

no power plant before.

So back in january, a team from caltech lodged the satellite, the space solar power demonstrator, into orbit. What are they trying to figure out?

The space solar power demonstrator is basically designed to test three core technologies that you need. One is the actual solar cells, the solar panels. How do you convert that efficiently to something where you can take the energy from the solar panel, in this case of a microwave beam, and be at to another place so you can use IT, and then finding a way to build really large, cheap structures in space, so that you could hold all this stuff together?

How large are we talking about?

Even the international space station is not that big compared to what we're talking about here. If you wanted, do the kind of energy scale that you get from a sizable power plant on earth. You're talking about solar satellite that are on the order of a mile wide. So the next step would be to build a slightly larger collector.

And then started talking about, okay, well, how would could you stream together in a five of these or ten of these or one hundred of these? And can you well remember, really like snakes and a cam, the toy you have, his kid, you on corker, and the snakes pop out. That's the basic idea.

You want a structures that packed up tight in a very, very little box or canister under tension. You send IT out in the space, and then IT expands into something really large, really light weight, but really stable. That's one of experiments on this caltech demonstrator.

So that's one part of this experiment. But what about actually beaming energy wirelessly? What are the researchers trying to figure out? And what if they found out .

so far the most notable success from the caltech demonstrator is from an experiment called maple. And maple stands for the microwave array for power transfer. Low orbit experiment.

good. chronic? yeah.

IT saves a lot of breath. Maple is the part of this demonstrator that takes electricity in. Turns out, in the microwave beams, IT steers IT, directs IT, and then actually uses IT to light up little else to prove they're converting the microwaves back into electricity. Let's run by ali huda mary at caltech. Electro magnetic .

waves do contain energy. The question is that how can you send IT efficiently?

It's small. IT sent this migrate beam about one foot at first, but it's the first time, as far as we know, that anybody has demonstrated that at all. It's really the initial proof principle that you can do this. You can do IT in space, you can do IT on a very constrained budget, very light weight, all these things you need if you're ever gona build big practical solar satellite there. So being able to do this, being able to do IT repeatedly and show that you have very tight control over the process.

that's a pretty big deal. How do they manage to make that work?

This project has been running for about a decade, and ali, huge maria and his team developed a whole new type of low cost, flexible electronics to make this thing work, really with an eye toward not just this experiment, but what comes after, and then what comes after that.

If you do IT with some sort of a controllable electrically here, and you have this always available dispatch ble power, meaning that you can actually stand IT where you need, when you need, and as much as you need. And the idea here is that you can provide power to areas where you don't have energy access, for example, in oro porter, in knocks out the system. So what you could do, the beauty of the things that, again, the receivers can be also very light weight and similarly design, so you can happen this like sheet that you roll, you can think about these mats that you roll open. And what they do is basically, do you just have IT and then plugged in into the system and then start of powering IT and you send your power there and then you're done like a year later and that the powers restored six months later, months later, you just based on roll IT on rapid and packet, and then use this for the next day.

The real ideas they send at one foot so that you can then do ten feet, one hundred feet, a thousand feet and all the way down to the ground. And in fact, they built a little window into the side of the satellite so they could send a micro beam all the way down to the ground. And then the kartel receivers on the ground picked up the signal. They didn't actually turn IT back electricity, but they collected IT as a signal to prove that this little demonstrator really was sending a beam. You could pick up on the ground, they would travel the distance, and that, in principal, you could be using for the next generation experiment, where you do full on power, beaming ing from satellite to earth.

That first microwave signal cent from the satellite was small. So how much bigger would IT have to be to center electricity from orbit to the earth? And would IT be safe more on that after the break.

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So you said microwave beams, are we talking about the appliances in my kitchen?

We are actually talking almost exactly like the appliances in your kitchen. Go on. There's this basic problem that, okay, making solar power and space cool idea, how do you get IT to the ground? right? What turns out, one of the easiest ways to do this is to convert IT into a microwave beam. They don't care about clouds, they don't care about rain, and they're relatively low frequency, low energy.

So the idea is you can send a beam that has enough energy to be useful when you collect them on the ground, but not so much energy that you freak people out that they're going to get blasted buying. Let's say, a laser beam. Lasers are a much more chAllenging technology, first of all, because they don't go through clouds, but also as soon as you tell people that you're beaming lasers from space, there's a much higher freak .

out factor.

Yeah I can see that that has has a very IT feels .

very billions in our super weapon. Yes, yes. So I was always told like don't standing from the microwave as a kid, and I imagine a microwave beam sending power back from space would be a lot more powerful than was heading up my rice and beans, right?

This is one of the big technical chAllenges and one of the tradeoffs that the proponents of space solar power dealing with. The more energy you put into the beam, the more efficient IT is, the Better is IT getting power from space down to the ground, but also then the more intense and potentially dangerous that beam is. So the current schemes try to strike up a middle ground that you have something on the order of hundred watts per square meter, you could walk through the beam. And as long as you're not staying there for a really long period of time, it's benie.

But even at that level, what is that due to birds? What is that due to a wildlife? If you happen to be living nearby, is there some leakage? What if the beam switches off its designated location and ends up hitting the planet somewhere else? The real question is this completely safe? And the answers, we think so, but we don't know. And you know, if these early experiments are successful, believe me, that can be one of the next big hurdles is proving that this really is very safe.

If the satellite has to be a square mile in size, how big do the receiver stations have to be on the ground then?

So partly depends on how intensity willing to go, which goes back to this question of what's safe. The current level of the energy density that some scientists think is safe would require about twenty five square miles of collecting area for two gig watts of power.

The more defuse you make, these beams that you send from space, the land you need to take up on the ground for collecting this energy, all of the infrastructure that goes into a coal or an oil powered, where you're drilling, where you're transporting, where you're loading and unloading fuel, the plant itself, the footprint of any kind of power, is pretty large. So you want to say twenty five square miles, that sounds a lot. But when you start to think about what they would mean in real practical terms.

it's not quite a bad. So this is like a lot of engineering and plus you got a deal with, know the cost of sending these out into space. So how much with the end of costing.

nobody knows that. That is the big question mark here. IT depends so much on launch costs and construction costs and all these other different factors.

So we're not going to know until you test IT more. And also, the more you have developed, the cheaper is going to get. Launch costs are dropping quickly.

So you can see we're on a path that it's become more affordable. The question is going to become actually cheap. It's going to become cost competitive with building a whole ton of energy storage on the ground.

But those technologies are enabling technologies for a lot of other things. Japan has been studying this for a long time. Their projects have been really just at the research stage, but recently the chinese government has shown a lot of interest in developing this technology.

There is also a very interesting project being run by the elopement space agency called solaris. The idea is to see quit a conStellation of solar space satellites, significantly improve the ability of the rope to cut their Greenhouse emissions and to really ramp up Green energy much more aggressively than you've been able to. So we're going to start seeing answers to these things very soon. No, it's not like space. Space solar power is going to take over instantly, but I think we're going to find out just over the next two, three years, you know, is IT viable and our people interested in IT enough that they're willing to make the investment and really start to see okay, if you scale this up, what can you do with this technology? Is this really something that could be giving us, like I said, this continuous clean energy that lets you bounce out the equation and really think about whole global economy that runs on renewable.

some curry s power. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal. Stephanie ogan friends is the editorial director of the future of everything. This episode was produced by me, danny Lewis, our Frank checker, is a partner of them, Michael level and just coffin, our sound designers, and road the music.

Catherine milsom is our supervising producer. I shall all muslim is our development producer. Scott salary and crisis sley are the deputy editors, and philon a patterson is the head of news audio for the wall street journal. Like the show, tell your friends and leave us a five star review on your favorite platform. Thanks for listening.

Amazon q business is the new generative A I assistant from A W S, because many tasks make business slow, as if waiting through mud help.

Luckily.

there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon q can security understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline task? Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q, got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W S dot com. Slash, learn more.