The Exchanges

Q California, actually signed a PPA for space-based solar In, I don't know, you could probably tell me in like 2009 or something like that, that obviously never went anywhere, but I remember that PPA. So maybe just walk me through the history of space-based solar power, and then we can get into like why this resurgence in interest now, what's changing and what are the technologies have to look like?

A Sure. So it is a, an old idea. It actually goes back all the way to 1941 when Isaac Asimov, um, Wrote about it in one of his science fiction stories where there was a manned, uh, space station that was beaming power to, uh, planetary bodies with, uh, through the use of radio frequencies. So, uh, collecting energy in space and, and sending it, uh, at a distance away. Uh, but it wasn't until the late sixties when the, uh, idea was really thought about from a technical point of view, how would you go about doing this? And, um, a gentleman called Peter Glaser in the U S working for, Arthur D. Little, um, came up with the first, uh, technical concepts of how, how you would collect energy in space and deliver that down to the ground. And he actually patented it in the early 19 seventies as well. Um, and then it was in the seventies oil crisis that, uh, hit, uh, the world, especially the Western Western world and, um, the U S and, and others were scrambling in those, uh, early years of the seventies to find alternative sources to fossil fuels. That's when the big investment into, uh, Other forms of, of energy, including nuclear fission and, uh, space-based solar power happened. And the Department of Energy in the US and NASA jointly did some substantial studies at that time to, uh, to understand what the, the promise and the challenges of space-based solar power were. And the conclusi…

AI assessment note: “It actually goes back all the way to 1941 when Isaac Asimov”

Q I cannot wait to talk to you about space-based solar power. Uh, it's a topic I've been learning about for the past, I don't know, six, 12 months, something like that, and find fascinating and really confusing. So let's start with the, let's start with the basics. Um, what is the concept of space-based solar power at the high level, and like, what's the promise of it?

A Okay, so the easiest way to think of this is an advanced form of solar power. So take your solar panels that you're well used to, and think of putting it in a place where you can get the most pure form of solar energy at the highest intensity where it's always available. And that's just simply not available on Earth, and the best place, and the only place you can do that is out, up in orbit in space. So far enough away from the Earth at a high enough orbit, You can see the sun, 24 seven, and the intensity of the sun is the maximum unfiltered by the atmosphere, and there you can collect solar energy from our sun, um, in, in the best way possible. Of course, the big challenge is how do you get it down to the Earth if you want to use it on the surface of the Earth, and that's where, uh, power beaming, wireless power beaming comes in, uh, uh, up, uh, up and coming capability to send electricity from space down to the Earth. So, Put your solar farm up in space, deliver the energy down to the Earth. That's what space-based solar power is about.

AI assessment note: “Put your solar farm up in space, deliver the energy down to the Earth.”

Q thing you didn't mention, though, is the actual power beaming component. Where, where are we in the trajectory of being able to, um, beam power wirelessly? Like, what have we proven there? What is the most power That has been beamed, and over what distance? Because again, here we're going to be talking about hundreds of megawatts to potentially gigawatts of power being beamed over, obviously, an extremely long distance.

A Sure. So, um, indeed, power beaming, uh, is probably the most, um, science fiction part of the whole thing to, to people who've first heard about, uh, space-based solar power, because people can imagine solar farms, uh, they're familiar with them, putting them up in space, uh, robotic assembly, um, Those are all things that, um, you know, people are already doing, uh, at a, at a smaller scale, but power beaming is not something we deal with, uh, really in our everyday life. And most people, I, myself, a few years ago, wasn't aware that it really is a thing. It's been a thing since, uh, uh, the time Nikolai Tesla, um, over a hundred years ago, thought about how power could be sent, uh, wirelessly and, and imagined having huge towers that could send power Uh, around the world, and he, and he looked into the theory of it, and he never managed to make it practical, but across the, the decades, people all around the world have been doing small-scale experiments showing that power can be sent wirelessly with using, uh, microwaves, radio frequencies, um, to be able to power things like, uh, aerial vehicles, um, sending power to, to balloons, um, obviously on, on, on the desktop, um, up to kilowatts of power, tens of kilowatts even, were shown by, uh, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Raytheon company in the 19 seventies in California, they did an experiment where they sent 30 kilowatt…

AI assessment note: “sent 30 kilowatts of power across a distance of over a kilometer”

Q Let's talk about where this industry to the extent that it's an industry is today. Who is working on space-based solar power, whether public or private sector? And what do you think of as being the sort of key milestones or demonstrations that we're expecting to see over the coming years?

A Sure. So, um, there have been some, uh, a number of, uh, players for the last decades, um, national agencies like, um, like NASA, uh, way back, uh, and then periodically, as I mentioned before. Uh, has looked at this. The European Space Agency has, uh, the Japanese Space Agency has had a, a long term, relatively modest level, but, but consistent level of technology development in this, uh, on this topic, uh, for, for a long time. Um, and the, uh, the UK and the United Kingdom has recently also got into, got into the game, uh, as well. So that's on the, on the, on the national, uh, side and, and private industry Has in the US, um, there are a couple of entities. Caltech, uh, is one that is, um, has got private funding from a donation, uh, about 10 years ago to, to work on space-based solar power, and they launched just this year a, uh, a bunch of technology demonstrations into, into orbit and announced, uh, some, some weeks ago the results, some, some positive results from their power beaming, uh, experiments in space that they did with that. And there's, um, Another privately funded company called Virtus Solis in the US that is also, uh, working on deploying space-based solar power in this decade as well. So we're starting to see, um, increased efforts, um, globally from a national perspective, and I haven't mentioned China. China has also in the last five years, uh, made annou…

AI assessment note: “national agencies like, um, like NASA... Caltech... Virtus Solis in the US”

Q which you described already, and there needs to be a receiver sitting somewhere on Earth that collects that beamed power. That's basically the, the steps. So, in terms of the technical challenge, can you sort of walk me through, um, How much is proven about each of those components? What's the hard part? What's the easiest part? What are the unknowns? And then we'll get into the economics from there.

A Sure. So the first thing to, um, be aware of is that from a physics perspective in terms of what is exactly happening, going from sunlight all the way to electricity into the grid, every step along the way is something that we know how to do from a physics point of view. And we've been doing it already for 60 years in space. So a space-based solar power system is essentially an extremely large telecommunication satellite, because that's what all telecommunication satellites do today. They take sunlight, they convert it to electricity, they then convert it to radio frequencies, they put it through a huge antenna, they send a beam of, uh, signals down to the Earth, uh, which are collected, radio frequency signals, and converted into, uh, information Uh, in form of electricity in, in, uh, in your mobile devices and, and other things. So step by step, this is not new science or new physics that needs to be invented to figure out how we can do this. The big challenge is the scale that this needs to be employed at in order to make it useful for power, uh, provision purposes to the earth. And especially for the earth market versus say the moon or Mars or, or in space power beaming, where Beaming kilowatts of power to other satellites or a megawatt of power to the surface of the moon, for example, would be extremely useful to have because they have zero in power infrastructure today. B…

AI assessment note: “every step along the way is something that we know how to do from a physics point of view”

Q The other question that I've gotten a lot when talking about this, uh, the power beaming part of this is safety. What do we know about the safety of beaming that amount of power, uh, from space or on land for that matter? Um, and what are the mitigants to avoid any safety concerns?

A So this is, uh, of course a paramount, uh, issue and, and no, no system would be deployed until it's been proven to be, uh, to be safe under all, uh, conditions. So We're designing, uh, safety into the system, uh, from, from the get go so that we can make sure that everything is, uh, under all, uh, conditions always going to be within safety limits. So radio frequencies. So one of the things we're, we're, we're doing is deliberately, uh, minimizing or, or, uh, reducing the intensity of the power that is in the beam to levels that are, um, safe. So, um, where, uh, We know the beam would, would be, uh, exposing, uh, or people or animals, um, would be exposed to, uh, parts of the beam. These, these intensity levels will be below the regulations and limits for, uh, such, uh, use of radio frequencies, which exists because we have, um, these frequencies we use are similar to wifi and mobile phone systems. So there's a lot of work that's been done around the world about safety. Uh, of, of different levels of watts per meter squared of, uh, radio frequencies in this gigahertz range that we're talking about. And, uh, the idea would be to make sure that any unrestricted regions around the receiver, uh, will have intensity levels which are within these safety limits. Now, in order to get sufficient, uh, power down, um, to the ground without having too large a receiver, we do need to have …

AI assessment note: “intensity levels will be below the regulations and limits for such use”

Q thousands of kilometers distance, right? So orders of magnitude more power, orders of magnitude more distance, uh, In any case. And so do you think of that as being, is this going to be like a steady progression to get to that point? Or are there, I guess, what are the, what are the technical limitations? Why can't we deliver 10 megawatts of power, a hundred kilometers on land today?

A It's not, it's not, it's not a issue of, uh, we, we, uh, can't do it today. People haven't tried to do it yet. It's not that people have put together these systems and found it too challenging and have failed to do it. There hasn't been the, the push to, um, to invest in, in demonstrations at that scale yet. Um, and that's for a number of reasons, um, because the, the terrestrial market for, for power beaming has only just started. People have only started really thinking about it, uh, for terrestrial use fairly recently. The idea of beaming power from space to earth is, is much, much older than, than terrestrial power beaming. And, and because, uh, as I said about the scale, Um, it's been so daunting for so long and never on paper made the economic case for people to get the investment to try to do it, uh, at the scale of, uh, a megawatt over, uh, 10 kilometers or a hundred kilometers on the earth as a demonstration, because they could not justify that, that full scale application. So raising the funding, the R and D To do substantial power beaming, um, technology development has, has been too challenging all across the world, whether it's Europe or the U S but now as, as the idea of the full scale application with the pressures of climate change and looking for alternative solutions, people are becoming more open-minded about taking on this huge challenge because the payoff i…

AI assessment note: “It's not a issue of we can't do it today. People haven't tried”

Q need to believe about the cost components in order to end up in a place where this could deliver power that we believe is economic? To the extent that you can use numbers, that's even better. Like, what, what do launch costs have to be, and where are they today? What, what are the big hardware costs We need to be thinking about, like, what, what drives the economics here?

A So, what's historically driven and, and continues, uh, to, to drive the economics are two, two major, two to three major things. So, first is the launch costs, because of the sheer amount of hardware that needs to be put into, into space. That's a major driver. And secondly, is the, the cost of the hardware itself, because there's a lot of hardware that's involved here, and space hardware has historically been, you know, Rather expensive per, per kilogram. So these two factors in the past, um, have been, uh, a killer for the economics because we were assuming expendable launches and we were assuming, uh, hand-built low production rate space hardware. And so that's what, uh, made, made this a no-go in the past economically, but Is fundamentally changing now. And we've seen an existence proof now from what, um, SpaceX in particular have done, uh, in the last decade with the Falcon rockets and with, uh, with Starlink and others are doing with constellations like OneWeb. They're shown that reusable launches can and do bring down costs massively. And this generation of reusable launches has already brought costs down by almost a couple of orders of magnitude from where they were. With the space shuttle, for example, and people are developing even bigger high cadence, uh, heavy lift launches, uh, launches that if, and when they're successful, uh, are going to bring the cost down by a…

AI assessment note: “once you get to cost below A thousand dollars or a thousand euros per kilo”

Q Yeah, that was actually going to be my final question for you, which is, in your mind, like, what's a realistic time frame we should be expecting here? How long will it take to get from where we are today to the potential for, let's just say, the first commercial scale, you know, commercial relevant scale, uh, space-based solar project?

A So when we talk about, uh, commercial scale, we typically think in the order of a hundred megawatts, uh, upwards. So this is The size of a typical solar, large solar power, uh, plant that you get on, uh, up to one to two gigawatts, which is, you know, the top end of, of nuclear power station. So, so that's, that's the range we'll be talking about. And, uh, when, when people ask, you know, how long will it be when, when this is ready, this is really depends on, um, you know, how much we're willing to invest in it. Peculiarly, space-based solar power is the, the, Only really promising form of clean energy, potential form of clean energy technology that I would argue the world is not, uh, investing in significantly, uh, because every other energy source that you can think of, whether it's wave power, uh, um, geothermal, nuclear fusion, all of these, uh, you know, and when I say geothermal, I'm talking about really deep geothermal where they're trying to go to 15 kilometers, all of these things, um, Can and are being and should be, of course, invested in, but space-based solar power is receiving almost no appreciable, uh, investment, uh, right now. Uh, so the, so the, the activities I've mentioned, uh, they are ongoing from, uh, around the world, but the, the levels of investment are not, not huge and not commensurate with what we ought to be spending to really try to find out whet…

AI assessment note: “how long will it be when, when this is ready, this is really depends on”