There is always a special feeling when something long touted to be the future ends up becoming the present, and that is rapidly becoming the case with solar power solutions.
Thanks to a concerted effort by manufacturers, installers and governments, as well as rapid improvements in the efficiency of photovoltaic cells through the use of materials like perovskite, solar power generation is becoming a critical part of how the future will be powered.
At the crossroads of the future comes a lot of difficult choices for how the solar market will look, however, and one suggestion to get around potential issues with cloud cover and nightfall is taking power generation to the edge of space.
In some senses, this is outright science fiction, but in other ways, it is a full-circle moment for a technology that proved itself beyond the heavens.
Solar Power Generation
Solar power generation is the process of turning sunlight into electricity. It uses solar panels made of special materials that capture sunlight and change it into energy we can use at home or work. This energy is clean, renewable, and helps reduce pollution because it doesn’t rely on burning fossil fuels. Solar power is a great way to save money on electricity bills and protect the environment. Plus, it works well in many places around the world, making it an easy and smart choice for producing energy.
The First And Final Frontier
The first practical application of solar panels was Vanguard 1, the fourth artificial satellite to be launched, the first to have electric power, and the oldest human-made object in space.
What made the solar panels so vital and so effective is that they greatly reduced the weight of the satellite, due to no longer being dependent on a heavy battery to function.
Due to this, the vast majority of space missions and especially space satellites that are not expected to pass the moons of Jupiter will take full advantage of solar panels as effectively a free source of high-capacity energy.
Because of this, from the 1941 short story Reason by Isaac Asimov up until the present day, there have been a range of proposals to take advantage of the ability to generate vast amounts of solar power in space and find a way to transmit that power to the Earth.
The first description of such an idea outside of science fiction was by Peter Glaser in 1968, who patented the idea in 1973.
His concept was to essentially redirect solar energy using a huge microwave antenna connected to a large solar array, which would transmit a focused beam of solar energy to a large rectenna on the earth, connected to the power grid.
It has constantly generated attention ever since, because having a solar farm in space would allow for a very intense collection of sunlight, one that is not limited to the time of day, compared to solar panels on earth.
The biggest problems, however, are the most obvious. It is extremely expensive in terms of finances, rare metals and fuel to send anything into space. A satellite launch typically costs millions of pounds to launch, and the cost of a receiving station can cost billions at the scales required.
That, and the myriad complexities and dangers found in an increasingly cluttered orbit, as well as energy loss during the conversion process and the degradation that comes from the hostility of space and the sheer heat involved, makes it far from easily practical at present.
Instead, the focus has been on improving the efficiency of solar panels on terra firma, and this has seemingly paid off with rapid improvements in solar panel quality and much lower costs.
