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New Energy World
New Energy World embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low carbon technologies.
Space-based solar power gets ready to lift off
14/2/2024
10 min read
Feature
The idea of harvesting the sun’s energy and beaming it back to earth as space-based solar power (SBSP) was originally conceived in a science fiction story by Isaac Asimov in 1941. Today, this ambitious concept is no longer fiction but being developed by universities and start-ups with early government backing in the UK, US, Japan, India and China. New Energy World Features Editor Brian Davis reports.
Why bother with space solar energy, when terrestrial solar farms and other sources of clean energy are well developed and growing fast in the energy transition?
‘Ultimately it comes down to reliability and uninterrupted power,’ says Dr Nicol Caplin, Exploration Scientist, ESTEC at the European Space Agency (ESA). ‘Though you can have massive solar arrays on Earth, you can never get around power disruptions half the day (at night-time) and weather. Whereas space-based solar power offers limitless, reliable and continuous power.’
Indeed, there is promise of 99% availability using solar panels in space to catch the sun. ‘You get 13 times more incident energy and that drives very compelling unit economics through the system,’ explains Sam Adlen, Co-CEO of Harwell-based Space Solar. According to their calculations the levelised cost of electricity will be $34/MWh (£27/MWh) ‘which means that the cost is similar to intermittent renewables, and a third of the cost of large-scale nuclear’, he says.