Europe is considering investing in a project for space solar power called SOLARIS to increase its energy independence and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explained the head of the European Space Agency.
“It will be up to ESA, the European Union and their Member States to push forward these types of technologies to solve one of the most pressing problems for people on Earth in this generation”, Explain Josef Aschbacher, director general of the space agency.
ESA had commissioned studies from consultancy groups based in the UK and Germany to assess the costs and benefits of space-based solar power development. These reports have been published this week and will be key for the agency to present the Solaris Project in its next council in November, where the priorities and financing of the same and future decision-making on this technology will be established.
SOLARIS: how space solar power would work
If Putin’s War in the Ukraine can be of any use, it is the urgent need to bet definitively on alternative methods of energy production other than the burning of fossil fuels, which is leading the Earth and humans to an unsustainable situation. This week we saw the latest advances in Nuclear Fusion and now we have another alternative with solar energy as the protagonist.
The underlying concept is quite ‘simple’ on paper. Satellites orbiting above the Earth’s atmosphere would collect solar energy and convert it into power. This would be sent to Earth via microwaves, where they would be captured by photovoltaic cells or antennas and converted into electricity for residential or industrial use.
The benefits of harnessing solar energy in space rather than on the Earth’s surface are well known. There are no nights or clouds that interfere in the collection of the light that reaches us from the Sun and also would not be penalized by the latitude of the continent. The problem is, as usual, to bring a project like SOLARIS into commercial practice.
The issues: $$$$$$$ and efficiency
Consulting reports commissioned by ESA look at the development of the technologies and the funding needed to start bringing a space-based energy system online. Europe currently consumes around 3,000 TWh of electricity a year, and reports describe massive installations in geostationary orbit that could meet between a quarter and a third of that demand. The development and deployment of these systems would cost hundreds of billions of euros.
Setting up a space solar power infrastructure would require a constellation of dozens of huge sunlight-harvesting satellites located 36,000 km from Earth. Each of these satellites would have a mass 10 times greater than the 450 metric tons of the International Space Station. Putting this device into orbit took more than a decade and those needed for solar energy would be larger and would have to be raised to a higher orbit.
One of the reports details that to achieve the maximum energy predicted by SOLARIS it would require “hundreds” or “thousands” of launches of a platform that does not exist right now. The most advanced of the current ones, that of SpaceX, would have to increase its capacity 200 times for SOLARIS to be completed in 2050.
The project is attractive in itself, but critics are not lacking. SpaceX boss Elon Musk himself called the project “stupid.” “If anyone likes space solar power it should be me. I have a rocket company and a solar company. I really should be on it. But obviously it won’t work. With a solar panel in orbit, you get twice as much solar energy, but you have to do a double conversion: photon to electron to photon, back to electron. What is your conversion efficiency? It’s going to be very difficult to even get to 50 percent. So just put that solar cell on Earth«Musk said.
There are also leading scientists against it. Casey Handmer outlined four areas where costs make space-based solar power prohibitively expensive: transmission losses, thermal losses, logistics costs, and a space technology penalty. By Handmer’s estimate, space-based solar power is at least “three orders of magnitude” more expensive than terrestrial energy sources.
The reports commissioned by the European Space Agency do not allay the main concern of critics of space-based solar power: that cannot financially compete with terrestrial energy sources, including ground-based solar panels. Europa may be at a higher latitude than is ideal for solar power, and its landmasses are often cloudy. But even so, getting power from space will require massive subsidies from European governments to achieve cost parity with terrestrial power.
At the moment all this sounds like science fiction. The engineering obstacles are enormous, the investment is very expensive and the timeline for its implementation is long. But what about in a few decades? We leave it there for your analysis and opinion.
