Company Plans To Pull Solar Energy From Orbit

Company Plans To Pull Solar Energy From Orbit

“Negotiators in Copenhagen have been trying to figure out just how far they will have to go to curb global warming. A Southern California company thinks it has the answer: 22,000 miles straight up. The Solaren Corp. wants to produce solar power in space. The location has a lot going for it: There is sunshine 24/7, and the real estate is free.

But the challenges are huge. How do you get all of the components into space and connect them once they’re there? Scientists have spent decades trying to figure that out. “The thing in space was going to be so heavy, it was going to take hundreds or thousands of rockets to put in orbit and thousands of astronauts,” explains Gary Spirnak, Solaren’s CEO.

So about eight years ago, Spirnak got together with a bunch of engineers he knew from his years at Hughes Aerospace. “They’d been in the business for 20, 30 years,” he says. “They’d solved just impossible problems working on government programs that you can’t talk about.” They began trying to figure out how to make an orbiting solar power plant light enough that it could be launched relatively cheaply. The solution they came up with was not to build one big power plant, but to put as many as four separate modules in the same geo-synchronous neighborhood. The components would track each other with radar and use small thrusters to maintain their positions.

Each component has a different function. Part 1 is essentially a big mirror that collects and focuses sunlight on Part 2, the solar panels. Those beam energy to Part 3, a really huge antenna that focuses and beams power back to earth in the form of radio waves.”

Read more at NPR