The Museum of the Future in Dubai is a seven-story structure that envisions a dreamlike world powered by solar energy. The museum is entirely operated by solar power and has over 1,000 artworks created by robots. The building is powered with 4,000 megawatts of solar energy and is a design marvel that forgoes support columns, relying instead on a network of diagonal beams. The museum’s focus on a sustainable future brings to the forefront a dream of the world and outer space exploration being powered by space-based solar power networks.
Space-based solar power is a concept of collecting solar power in space and transmitting it to Earth as a microwave or laser beam. The idea is to capture the sunlight available in space, which is on average more than ten times as intense as it is on the surface of the Earth and beam it down to receiving stations across the planet.
The basic concept has been around for a long time but has been given fresh urgency by the need for new sources of clean and secure energy to aid Europe’s transition to a Net Zero carbon world by 2050. Decades of research have led to a diversity of concepts using different forms of power generation, conversion, and transmission principles. The so-called reference design transforms solar power into electricity via photovoltaic cells in geostationary orbit around Earth. The power is then transmitted wirelessly in the form of microwaves at 2.45 GHz to dedicated receiver stations on Earth, called ‘rectennas’, which convert the energy back into electricity and feed it into the local grid. Because the power is transferred wirelessly, it will be possible to transfer it to receiver stations where it is required, even to the Moon or other planets, where a readily available energy supply will boost our ability to explore these locations.
The sun is the closest thing we have to an infinite energy source, says Paul Jaffe, an electronics engineer at the US Naval Research Laboratory to the Financial Times, who has studied space-based solar power for 16 years. You [could] create a global energy network that could provide energy potentially anywhere on Earth. Space solar could do for energy what GPS did for navigation.
Space-Based Solar Power may be enabled by a revolution in the economics of space transportation. Due to SpaceX’s reusable Falcon rocket there’s been a 90 to 95 per cent reduction in the cost of launching payloads into space. Furthermore, SpaceX’s gigantic Starship, currently in development can lift more than 100 tonnes into orbit, which promises to take costs down even further.
Space agencies around the world are investing in this technology and testing its viability. If this technology is proven to be technically and economically feasible, there could be a revolutionary contribution towards the sustainable energy transition and sustainable life beyond Earth.
