Space Solar Power

The idea of powering human civilization by collecting energy fron the Sun in huge satellites and beaming it into Earth's electrical grid has been around for decades. If things go right, the concept may finally be tested soon. Japan is studying a plan that would allow that island nation to get a large percentage of its energy from space-based solar by the 2030s. California is looking at a proposal to develop space-based solar as a viable energy alternative in fifteen years, and various other governments and private companies are looking at what's possible.

In a world quickly approaching nine billion humans, with expensive energy and climate damage, getting clean, limitless energy from the Sun is certainly attractive. At some point, the cost of space-based solar will be competitive with, say, oil, as that resource gets harder and harder to develop. Nor does space-based solar have the potential for disaster nuclear plants have. The guts of a SSP system, the huge satellite, would be beyond natural disasters, and would be beyond the reach of terrorist and most military attacks. Indeed, a mature SSP system would be a decentralized system; attacking one satellite would make very little sense.

Getting the energy from space to Earth is still a problem. Microwaves and lasers have been proposed as possible modes of delivery, but their effects on the atmosphere are still unclear. Building huge structures in space and keeping them properly oriented and maintained for decades or longer are still likely engineering feats beyond our capability, too, but that can change. In 1961, putting a man on the Moon and safely returning him to the Earth was utterly beyond any human agency-- but it wasn't by 1969.