By Keith JohnsonIs Pacific Gas & Electric’s plan for space-based solar power as crazy as it sounds? Yes and no—it’s not as crazy as it is expensive with today’s technology.
The California utility, which just requested permission to enter a 15-year agreement with privately-held Solaren Corp. to deploy a big solar-power satellite in space, buried all the technical and economic details of the proposal in the confidential section of its regulatory filing. In a ho-hum manner, PG&E largely portrayed space-based solar as just another way for the power company to comply with increasingly-stringent state targets for clean-energy generation.
The biggest challenge, PG&E said, is building a large, multi-megawatt satellite to harvest solar power in space; the small solar arrays currently in use are a fraction of that size.
For the Pentagon, which took a close look at space-based solar power in 2007, the idea has both more potential and even bigger challenges. The report called space-based solar a “viable and attractive” way to diversify the nation’s energy supplies.
The upside: Solar arrays in space would have unfettered, 24-hour access to solar radiation, making it true baseload power. The 2007 report notes that a single, kilometer-wide strip in space holds more energy potential than all the world’s oil and gas reserves.
The downside: Putting solar arrays in space in the first place. Simply put,
“existing launch infrastructure cannot close the business case,” the report found.
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