California utility PG&E has signed a deal for the world’s first space-based solar power plant, to be built by a secretive Southern California startup staffed by veterans of the U.S. Air Force, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
In papers filed Friday with the California Public Utilities Commission, San Francisco-based PG&E asked for approval of a 15-year, 200-megawatt contract with Solaren, a Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based company that plans to put satellites in geosynchronous orbit by 2016 to collect solar energy. The sunlight would then be transmitted to a ground station in Fresno, Calif., in the form of radio frequency waves and converted into electricity to be distributed into the power grid. Since the sun shines 24/7 in space, a Solaren solar farm could theoretically supply “baseload” green electricity to coal-dependent regions without access to abundant sources of renewable energy.
While PG&E won’t spend any money until Solaren beams down electricity, it’s uncertain whether regulators will be willing to count a contract for such unproven, bleeding-edge technology toward the utility’s state-mandated obligation to obtain 20% of its power from renewable sources by 2010 and 33% by 2020. After all, the utilities commission last year rejected PG&E’s contract with a wave energy firm on the grounds that the technology was too early stage. PG&E’s discussion of the Solaren project’s viability was filed under a request for confidentiality.
“Solaren is using an innovative space-based solar technology, which, if successful, would represent a break-through in the renewable power industry,” Brian Cherry, PG&E’s vice present of regulatory relations, wrote in the utility’s 24-page application. “While emerging technologies like space solar face considerable hurdles under a traditional viability analysis, PG&E believes that potential, significant benefits to its customers from a successful space solar installation outweigh the challenges associated with a new and unproven technology.”
Space-based solar has long been a dream and numerous studies have been conducted on its potential viability. In the documents filed with the utilities commission, PG&E (PCG) asserted that the biggest technological obstacle is building satellites that can collect megawatts’ worth of sunlight rather than transmitting the energy miles to a ground station.
“The engineering challenge of building a Space Solar Power Plant is not the energy conversion process itself, but the need to engineer and build MW-class SSP satellites, which are much larger than current kW-class communications satellites,” Cherry wrote. “Solaren’s patented SSP Plant design employs the SSP concept described above to deliver renewable electricity to PG&E.”
Solaren’s website offers a single page that contains no information on the company other than the slogan, “Energy for Tomorrow with Technology of Today.”
In its filing, PG&E said that, “Solaren was founded in 2001 to develop, engineer, test, construct, and operate space solar generating stations. Solaren has informed PG&E that its team is comprised of experienced satellite engineers and space scientists with 20 to 45 years of experience in the leading edge space industry and come from various aerospace organizations that include the U.S. Air Force, Hughes Aircraft Company, Boeing (BA), and Lockheed Martin (LMT).
Not all the hurdles to space-based solar are likely to be technological. While there are no desert tortoises in space or other protected wildlife that live on earth-bound sites for big solar power plants, any orbiting solar farm will have to pass muster with a long list of state, federal and international government agencies. Among them, the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA and the United Nations, according to PG&E.
Green Wombat 
OH BROTHER.
We might was well invest in sending the spent fuel rods from our Nuke plants to the sun if we are getting all spaced out on this energy endavour.
This plan has no chance of getting off the ground, give me a break
I never understood the attraction of space based solar energy given the huge financial and energy costs of putting things into orbit. The sun doesn’t shine 24/7 in space unless the satellite stays in the same position relative to the sun, but then it won’t be fixed relative to the base station…
At Least They have a plan…….. Sounds like a Sci – Fi Novel ……. Full marks for trying…….. Hope they can make it work……….
Many years ago I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that showed an orbiting photoelectric power station would need to cost less than $700 per square meter, including launch costs, to break even. Not likely.
I assumed the station would have a 10-year life — pretty good longevity in synchronous orbit, where it would be exposed to hard solar and cosmic radiation.
The problem is the amount of solar power per square meter, even in space, still isn’t all that much, and you lose 85% of it right off due to the inefficiency of solar cells. (Modern solar cells can do a bit better, but ALL solar cells lose efficiency as they age. A lifetime average of 15% is pretty good.)
After that you have a stack of conversion and transmission losses before the power gets to the customer. I assumed 90% efficiency at each step of the way, but the compound losses were still huge.
You can do better if you forget solar cells and orbit a thermal power plant — focus sunlight on a boiler and make steam to run a turbo-generator. You might triple your initial conversion efficiency. But to send the sunlight to the boiler you have to orbit and assemble a huge mirror array. (And if you’re looking to generate Megawatts, the solar collector IS huge!)
A cheaper and simpler alternative would be to forget the solar collector, orbit a nuclear reactor and use the same turbo-generator and microwave system to make electricity and send it to earth.
Better yet, just forget about orbiting anything and build a nuclear power station on earth.
To this day I wonder why anyone thinks they can make an orbiting solar power station pay. The physics are pretty straightforward — no PhD required. Maybe there’s a way to make it economic, but I don’t see it.
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“Space Solar Power hoax/illusion DEBUNKED” article
http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/038sspdebunked.html
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I think April Fool’s Day was over a few weeks ago.
Try explaining the internet to someone in 1922. Look at what you can do with your cell phone today, compared to the rotary dials we had when I was a kid. Remember when people had drafting tables? My mother rode a horse to school in the 1940’s!
We can spend our time and effort finding solutions and new technology, or we can sit back and poo-poo any new idea. Which do you choose?
Isn’t this the type of technology they used in Spies Like Us?
At the very least, they will buy up lots of space grade cells, which will be available for cheap when they are bankrupt.
We should all keep an eye out for the “sale”
I’m skeptical. The physics and economic factors don’t seem to add up here. Gathering megawatts in space would require vast orbiting collection surface area which would surely be more expensive to construct than the same array in a desert. The sun does not shine 24/7 in orbit over California because even in orbit you can be on the dark side of the earth at night. Wirelessly beaming energy to earth would be quite a hard problem to solve requiring a very directional radio energy beam and probably a vast array of radio energy collectors in the middle of nowhere – you may as well be collecting solar energy. Also at microwave frequecies this high energy beam which may be miles in diameter would surely be a huge hazard, cooking any wildlife. I’m not quite sure why there is so little concrete information on the web about this. I wonder if instead this is a way of riding on the thrill of ‘green energy’ to siphon investors money to bogus activities.
What about the people kept in constant shadow under the solar pannels held in geo-syncrinis orbit?
This is an incredibly bad idea.
It’s too expensive.
Something that large will require on-site maintenance and monitoring.
There is so much junk in space now that something that large will get hit with junk, and Murphy’s Law will then be enforced, all the electric power generated will utterly destroy the most expensive and hardest-to-replace component.
The device has to send radio-frequency waves to a collector on earth, and that “beam” will be very focused when it leaves the station, but will invariably spread out to cover a large area, requiring a large collector – which will also collect dust.
The atmosphere will absorb a considerable portion of that radio-frequency beam, hence losses. Cloud cover and rain will make it worse.
From a military standpoint, this is a great idea – a power supply that can be turned into a weapon. The radio frequencies can be adjusted to blanket and block all radio-based communications (overload the electronics as would an ElectroMagnetic Pulse). Or a microwave transmitter could be used to cook (boil) any living object in its path. But this could be easily foiled with a foil-covered umbrella or a tin hat (joke!).
We have polluted the earth.
Let us pollute the space as well!!!
@Nathan
we are all happy to see new ideas come true, but, to have these Space Solar Power Plants, they need to find a way to send them in space for (at least) the SAME price to deploy them in a desert, rather than today’s 300+ TIMES “price” to send them to 36,000 km.
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“What about the people kept in constant shadow under the solar pannels held in geo-syncrinis orbit?”
There are hundreds of satellites alrady in geosynchronous orbits – how many times have you seen a shadow from any of them? There are thousands of satellites in near-earth orbit – how many times have you seen a shadow from any of them, for that matter?
“The sun does not shine 24/7 in orbit over California because even in orbit you can be on the dark side of the earth at night.” The satellites would be about 23,000 miles above the earth – about 1/10th of the way to the moon. The earth’s shadow is a small target at that distance. There would be occasional, short periods where the satellite would be in the earth’s shadow, like a lunar eclipse. That’s why there would be multiple satellites.
This idea may not work economically, but don’t try to use bogus physics to explain it away.
A truly nightmarish idea. Import more energy into the Earth’s atmosphere? Ionize a huge column of the atmosphere 24-7? How much energy will be used to launch this device, send maintenance crews? How will it defend itself against natural and human-created high-speed objects? What percent efficiency from collector to power grid? What will be uptime percentage given the months delay to launch a repair crew/robot? When it’s useful life is over how will they recover it? This is certain to be the most expensive power generation since the industrial revolution began.
A classic scam. Raise research or VC money to pay fat salaries with absolutely NO hope of ever producing real goods and services, then fold in a year or two. It’s just a surprise to find PG&E is that big a sucker. Where is the business plan? I’d like to see that one!
PGE was bankrupt in 2001 when it had rolling blackouts. Solaren was funded during that time. Now, you know where the fired PGE executives were idling.
PGE is using this idea as a scare tactic to the regulators to bend the alternative energy rules. Besides, they may be telling the defence department that this device could be focussed on North Korea in the time of need. Sounds familiar … watch James bond movies.
I want a piece of their action since the Wall Street money machine is temporary broken, a pure fools attempt to get a few billons from Uncle Sam and California’s tax payer.
CONVERT THE CURRENT RADIO WAVES FROM THESE CRAPPY TOP 10 STATIONS THAT PLAY THE SAME 10 SONGS OVER AND OVER
What, only 200 megawatts? With the inherent risks and expense, it will only be able to replace between 1/5th and 1/20th of a coal plant.
Yeah … let’s keep the earth cool by pumping even more energy into the system from the outside. If green = “less global warming”, then this is the orangest idea I’ve ever seen.
So, power plant in space huh? One good missile and its lights out for the West coast? Solaren’s going to have to work on a defense system before this idea ‘takes off’.
It is a common Utility tactic. Try to appease the renewable energy % requirement by betting on the renewable provider that is most likely to fail. That way you can say “We ordered renewable on a contract – but they didn’t deliver – it isn’t our fault” It is done this way all over the country.
There must be a way to weaponize this!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
this is idiotic. not a second of thought or intelligence was applied to this post. anything in geosynchronous orbit isn’t “always” in the sun.
ignoring the obvious issue of insanely expensive cost….
To all you geometrically-challenged folk, a geosynchronous orbit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit
CAN always remain in sunshine.
To illustrate, imagine holding a wireless laptop computer at arm’s length to view this image:
1. with your finger, trace a large flat circle around the Earth to represent an orbit around the poles.
2. stand in the middle of the room and slowly do a 360 degree turn, keeping your eye on the laptop screen.
At no time does any part of that orbit travel behind the Earth into its shadow. A satellite in such an orbit would be bathed in sunshine 24/7/365.
Somewhere between one hundred million and one billion times as much energy as the Earth gets from the sun flows out into space unused. The idea is to capture some of it. Granted, we could more easily put solar PV plants on Earth, but terrestrial real estate will ultimately get pretty scarce, and space is pretty big. Besides, once we get this technology figured out, we can make it cheaper and more efficient. Studies were done on this back in the 70’s; I read about them in IEEE publications. The microwave beam could be made safe so it would not ionize the atmosphere, nor cause harm to a flock of geese or the passengers in an aircraft cabin.
I’m trying to understand how this will work. Will this operate like the millions of dollars spent by taxpayers to put ‘TV’ satellites in orbit, only to be then controlled by Hughes/Dishnetwork who then gouges consumers for the service? Will this be like the “energy credits” of the Carter years when you could get an incentive for putting up a wind generator in your yard? By the way, in that scenario, you had to have something like 28 mph winds to run a couple of lamps in your house. Also, it was touted that you could ‘sell back’ power to your power company. While this was true, When you needed electricity, you bought at retail, if you ever had power to add to the grid (with tornadic winds!) you sold at wholesale.
From a technical standpoint, how wide of a beamwidth will the proposed ‘system’ require? Are we talking about a half mile wide beam back to the Earth? What safety measures will have to be in place? If the power is ‘piped’ down by Microwave, or other (RF) Radio Frequency methodology, what will be the cancer risks to people, and at what range? Will this shutdown air travel through the ‘forbidden zone’? What about life itself? For all the tree-huggers out there, how will PG&E keep birds, small mammals, and other forms of life out of their microwave in the sky? What happens during a storm? Heck, I lose TV reception when a cloud comes between the satellite and my dish receiver. What is the expected effiency (wire at long lengths can be as little as 70%) for the transmission of the power? Is the 200 megawatts at the “top” or at the distribution point “below”? A 300 megawatt RADAR transmitter sends out a signal that is measured in microvolts (1/1000th of a pen lite battery) at 100 miles.
Finally, will all U.S. taxpayers pay for this folly? This isn’t ‘science’ it just plain ‘pork’ to a utility company.
“The microwave beam could be made safe so it would not ionize the atmosphere,”
In the first place, microwave energy does not ionize the atmosphere. Not even close.
Secondly, there’s a little thing called the “inverse square law” to consider. All forms of radiated energy (including radio waves, light, radioactivity, etc.) are governed by this. What it says is that the energy is attenuated as a function of the square of the distance. (Do a search on “inverse square law” for more details.) Since this is a radio signal, it obeys a derivation of this known as “free space path loss”, which takes into account the frequency of the radio wave. This is a basic physical law, as basic as gravity, and no technology developments will change this.
What this means to a satellite based electrical system is that for every MEGAWATT they beam down from space, they will have about ONE WATT of power at the ground, assuming there are NO atmospheric or other losses in the process.
So what does this mean for the practical value of such a system?
Ain’t gonna happen.
“PG&E won’t spend any money until Solaren beams down electricity”
Read more carefully. It may be a worthless idea, to appease regulators. But this isn’t costing the utility a single penny unless it works. The only cost, as mentioned by the more astute commentors is the opportunity cost of ignoring more practical methods of generating renewable energy. But considering the potential contract is for a whopping 200megawatts, it’s not a big deal.
The inverse square law applies to point sources which radiate equally in all directions. Focused radiation does not obey this. A good example is a laser beam. Try to get your physics straight before spouting it.
People, stop trying to use physics to debunk this. You obviously don’t know a lick of it.
I, for one, am excited to see this opportunity looked at seriously. It wouldn’t even be considered if it wasn’t at least somewhat economically feasible. Stop assuming you know all the physics and economics behind these decisions and just be supportive of people trying to bring you cleaner, cheaper energy.
It’s unfortunate that such innovative ideas get nipped in the bud by the pseudo-intellectual nature of public opinion.
Take us to a bold new world, Solaren.
Hey Mark, smart guy, guess u didn’t read the part that said senior engineers working on this project with 40plus yrs experience. I’m sure you can beat that, get a grip, “inverse square law”, rules are meant to be broken. You ever think that magnetic force could propell or suck those beams, waves, frequencies whatever at a faster rate than the sq or the distance, think about it, magnets hold the key to our future!