Bottom of the form, can you imagine your next solar panel being installed 11 kilometers above your head rather than on your roof? The latest idea for clean and endless energy is to put solar panels in space, where the sun never sets. Terrestrial photovoltaic solar energy has advanced greatly in recent years, and in the Middle East, the cheapest and largest systems in the world have been installed.
Together with wind turbines, it has become the cornerstone of the new low-emissions energy economy. However, even in the best locations, the capacity factor of solar energy—the ratio between annual production and maximum instantaneous generation—is only 20%. Clouds, dust, fog, and night are direct enemies of solar energy.
There are partial solutions: using daytime solar energy to charge batteries or generate hydrogen for storage, or connecting different time zones and latitudes with high-tension cables thousands of kilometers long. But this has clear limitations.
So what they have thought of is creating an option that consists of placing a huge system of mirrors and solar panels in geostationary earth orbit, where the sun is visible almost all the time. The electricity generated is converted into high-frequency radio waves and transmitted to a ground station that converts it back into electricity. It sounds crazy, but it’s a real project. The set can be easily redirected, so it could serve several very distant receivers, switching from one to another when night falls or demand increases.