Technology, Connected - Space-Based Solar Power Vs Climate Change

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Space-based solar power is the focus of this episode with Sanjay Vijendran, former European Space Agency lead on space-based solar power and founder of Space Energy Insights. We explore whether solar farms in orbit could collect sunlight above the clouds and beam clean energy back to Earth. The conversation explains why space-based solar power is being reconsidered now, from climate change and energy poverty to reusable rockets, falling launch costs, in-space manufacturing and lunar resources.You'll learn about wireless power transmission, radio frequency versus laser power beaming, safety, public perception, regulation, and the challenge of turning a 50-year-old idea into a serious clean-energy technology. --Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping the future. 🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack🎧 Take us with you on Spotify🎧 Remember Steve Jobs on APPLE📺 Get the clips and outtakes on Instagram --Chapters(00:00) Space Based Solar Intro(01:03) What Is Space-Based Solar Power(02:41) Energy Poverty (05:03) The Viability of Space-Based Solar Power(07:23) Wireless Power Transmission(10:14) Technical Challenges of Scaling Up(12:03) Cost Considerations and Economic Viability(14:27) Future of Manufacturing in Space(17:15) Hot Takes and Personal Insights(19:55) Economics of Space-Based Solar Power(29:21) Understanding Energy Sources (31:22) Private Companies in Space-Based Solar Power(33:19) RF vs. Lasers(35:47) Safety Mechanisms in Space-Based Power Systems(41:06) Collaboration vs. Competition(42:37) Political and Cultural Barriers(46:44) Investing in Space-Based Solar Power   

disruptors and curious minds. Welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper where we get behind the next groundbreaking technology that is going to change the way we live, to change the way we work, going to change the way we interact as individuals, as societies. Today, we're talking about big problems and big problems need big solutions. And everything points back to this book called The High Frontier. It was written in the 70s about creating colonies in space. Mark, I'm going to throw this quote at you to set the stage today.

So, quote, from this book, High Frontier, almost any static society is forced in self-defense to suppress new ideas. Something to think about right there. This is we talk about these calcified systems is how we refer to these old systems that suppress new information, suppress new ideas in an effort to preserve themselves. Defense mechanism. Correct. Correct. So everyone's heard about net zero carbon emission by 2050. and we're going to talk about a solution.

Mark, intro our guest. Let's dig into the show. As is happening a lot at the moment, I'm thinking on paper, Joe. The answer lies in space. Our guest is Sandra Vigendron. He is the director of Space Energy Insights. His new venture before that, he was at the European Space Agency. And he's here today to speak to us about space-based solar power.

Welcome to the show, Sanjay. It's a pleasure. Thank you for thinking on paper with us. Thank you very much, Mark and Jeremy. Pleased to be here. Sanjay, welcome. Let's jump right in. Talk to us about space-based solar power.

What is it? How can you break it down super simply for people that haven't heard it? So the easiest way to think of it is essentially putting a solar farm that you're familiar with from the countryside up in space in orbit above the earth, above the clouds, and high enough that you're effectively out of the shadow of the earth. So there you see the sun 100% of the time. And that's one of the main characteristics of space-based solar power is you get a source of clean, liable energy 24-7 because there's no day and night. There's no weather.

There's no clouds. There's no seasons up there. So you get more intense sunlight and you get it all the time. And if you can then convert that to electricity and beam it down or indeed even have mirrors and reflect that down onto the surface of the earth, you have a way to get energy when and where it's needed on the planet all of the time. This is not science fiction. This is stuff that has been experimented with and tested in various ways. Let's talk about what this can do and why it matters because there's a tie between energy or access to energy and living standards. Absolutely.

So there's definitely a direct correlation between the standard of living of human societies and their energy use in the sense that having available, affordable energy, allows you to improve standards of living of people. And if you look at across the world, the societies which have the highest standard of living tend to have the highest availability of energy and use a large amount of energy as well. So today, a huge number of people on the planet, in fact, about three quarters of the planet are not receiving, are not having available a substantial amount of energy to improve their quality of life. And in fact, almost 900 million people live without electricity, a reliable electricity on planet today in 2025, which is amazing when you think about that.

So energy poverty is really a huge issue on planet Earth with 8 billion people and growing. And one of the big challenges, not just to decarbonize existing societies, especially in the industrialized world in the next 30 years that we need to do to mitigate climate change, we need to find a way to be able to be able to grow with the availability of energy and electricity, especially to societies around the world which simply don't have it today. And we want to do that in a clean way and they shouldn't be restricted from being able to have a lot more energy into the future. So we've got multiple problems that we need to challenge you to address at the same time

and to provide all of the energy that's needed to the people who need it and to do it in a clean way. Energy poverty, it's such a powerful phrase because as long as energy poverty is a part of the human collective condition, those with the energy streak ahead and those without the energy get left behind and that gap that seems to be everywhere just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Absolutely. There's this huge inequality in terms of standards of living and competition for resources, of course, as well that exist when there's scarce and availability of energy is not equal, let's say, and too hydrogenous across the world. You worked with Issa leading the program to determine how this stuff could impact Europe, the energy program, where they're looking,

how space-based solar power specifically can be a great solution. You have a new role now. We'll talk about your consultancy in a bit. But while you were heading up this initiative, how are they taking it as far as a viable solution? What were their sentiments on it? And how bullish were they about it? Yeah, I let the development of a proposal for a new initiative at ESA, which was actually the first dedicated research and development program on the topic of space space solar power that the agency was to have back in 2022. And that was established then and I then led up the implementation of that program, which was essentially trying to dig deep into the technology development as well as the concepts of space-based solar power to really understand whether this was the right time

to move forward in a big way with this technology, because it's not a new concept, a new technology. It's been around for over 50 years, but it's always been seen as economically unviable as long as the costs of getting things into orbit and building large structures in orbit were very high, which they have been for decades until the last 10 years or so where things, things have dramatically changed. So through this initiative, we really wanted to get that hard data to convince ourselves and our stakeholders that, yes, now everything has come into place. And the challenge for, of course, decarbonization has only grown in that time.

Everything has come together to really show us that we do need to move forward at pace to develop this capability here in Europe. As part of that initiative, we funded some technology development. activities and we did concept studies for how you might build full scale, commercial scale, space-based solar power systems to inform our next steps. You mentioned this stuff works. Like wireless power distribution works. Wireless power transmission or power beaming, it's sometimes known as, is probably

the most science fiction part of the whole concept of gathering energy in space and delivering it down to the ground because people can understand putting a large solar farm up in space, but how are you going to get that energy down, not with a long cable? So actually delivering energy wirelessly is something that we are not, we don't see in our everyday lives down here on Earths. Most people aren't aware that it's actually a thing. In fact, I myself didn't realize about five years ago that it's actually a thing. I'd vaguely heard about it, you know, in the scientific literature, but I always thought it was a kind of laboratory scale thing that people are working on. But actually it goes all the way back to Nikolai Tesla more than 100 years ago who had grand visions of being able to transfer energy,

wirelessly across the planet from towers distributed across the earth that could beam power to different parts of the planet. He wasn't successful with that, although he was successful with transferring energy across the distance of a room. But it wasn't until technology improved back in the 60s in the US when people first started to demonstrate that you could in a directional way, in a focused way, send wireless power across the distance. And since the 1960s, there's been dozens of experiments from international organizations across the world who've shown repeatedly that energy can be moved from one point to another from the ground into the air, across distances from meters up to kilometers distances and at power levels of up to a few kilowatts. So we know the theory,

we know for a fact this can be done, certainly at small scale and it's been demonstrated many, many times on the surface of the earth, at least, and up into the air. But what we haven't done is shown that it can be done at a much larger scale to deliver huge amounts of power over much longer distances like what would be needed from space to Earth, which you're talking about thousands of kilometers. So it's really not a question of science

or understanding some new physics, but really being able to develop from an engineering perspective, large enough antennas to beam that power, to transmit that power, and large enough receivers that can receive that power to be able to make this useful technology. if you want to use it for power delivery at scale. It's about the demonstration that we did in Germany in 2022.

That was done at a hangar at the Airbus, the space company in Europe's facility, where we beamed across 36 meters, two kilowatts of power. And I stood a few meters away from where this invisible beam of power was going across from a transmitter that was about two by two meters and squared. to a receiver the same size on the other end. And we fed that power into the electricity that came out of the receiver into a small mockup

of a city to show it could light the lights of a city. It also went into a small hydrogen electrolyzer to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. And some of that power went to cool some beers in a fridge as well. And so we got to open the most important test case. Absolutely. Real utility right there. I'm pretty sure we had the world's first first. wirelessly cooled beers that anyone has ever had because this is Germany. So we know it works

and we did it in a safe way because we were measuring the power levels that were kind of leaking out of where this beam was being sent and it was extremely low and within all the safety limits. So the technology is there. It's known. It's proven. But the big challenges, can we scale this up to the dimensions that would be needed to be able to deliver power from space to Earth? That's the challenge ahead. So to quickly wrap, this particular segment, and we'll transition into these technical challenges of scaling, which you, it's a viable solution.

It works. You've done some economics on it. People are open to it largely and putting more time and energy into studying how this thing could happen, which your consultancy is largely going to be doing that as well. Mark, let's dive into some of the scale challenges here. Yeah, let's move to. I just want to bring up space elevators because she said you can't use a big wire, but maybe if you have geostationally orbit,

you could build a space elevator, put the wire and cable inside that, and then send it down to Earth that way. So enough. There's, there's, it doesn't take long on YouTube to find naysayers to the idea of this. And there's quite a few challenges that they say,

this is why it's not feasible on a large scale, capacity, power, density, the size, the sheer size of the arrays you need on Earth to gather. Because you have to make the power beam so weak that therefore you need lots of amplifiers on to make it viable and an expense again. If we could speak through each one of those.

First of all, space space oil power has a myriad different applications from the smaller scale where you might send power to users that need relatively small amounts of power but need it in a place that they can't get it otherwise. So for example, for defense applications, forward operating bases where troops are away from the grid and access to energy, they typically fly in diesel for. running generators. And that has huge logistical costs, also costs in human lives as things get ambushed. So being able to receive even, say, a megawatt or so of power when you needed, where you are in these remote places can be very valuable for such an application. But on the other

end of the scale, if you want to really power cities and countries and help make a dent on our energy transition and climate goals, you need to provide power at the levels of hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts like a nuclear power station, a fossil fuel power station, and many of these eventually. So that's another scale of the problem versus the small end. But if you look at the top end of the scale where we imagine space-based solar power contributing to a good fraction of the world's energy needs into the future, that you'd need to be able to build gigawatt scale power plants, which would mean that you need to put up something similar in size to the solar farms, the large solar farms we have

down here on Earth. So think of an area of some square kilometers in size. That's pretty big, of course. And looking at what we've built in space so far historically, there's been nothing even a hundred times smaller than that built by humanity so far. So this is the first problem when people compare it with what we've been doing so far in space that naturally scares people. In fact, it took me six months to get my head around the idea of what we were trying to propose to do here. But the thing to remember is that, you know, things have changed a lot in the last decades. The International Space Station, for example, which is the largest object in space that's ever been built, was put together by astronauts built out of very complicated large parts

launched with the space shuttle. And that's a very different kind of structure, infrastructure, and build process than is imagined to be done for something like space-based solar power plants, where by design, especially the more modern designs people are working out, are very much modular. So think of just a solar farm on the earth. It may be huge, maybe kilometers across, but it's all made up of two meters by one meter size solar panels, which are put into place by people onto racks and just repeatedly done a million times. And this is how the designs of new space-based solar power stations typically are also considered now, to be very, very modular, made of mass-produced parts in factories down on Earth,

using automotive consumer electronics types of production technologies. And then all of these are flat-packed into rockets, launched into space, and put together by robots, not human beings, not fleets of astronauts, autonomous robots. So it's these kinds of capabilities which are coming online now. Of course, we haven't demonstrated it at this scale ever before, but we're seeing the building block technologies are there. And we believe that with development and experience, we will be able to put these things together

built up over time into these large structures. So that's the first problem, the scale, which of course hasn't been demonstrated, but there's every reason to believe that we will be able to work out how to do this. Don't forget, in the energy sector on Earth does really big things. If you think about a nuclear power station or hydroelectric dam, those are huge structures and the Birch Khalifa in Dubai, at almost a kilometer tall, people know how to do big things

if they put their mind to it. It's just so we haven't done it yet in space and we have to prove it. A few weeks ago, we had StarCloud on it and they're building data centers in space, link here to see that show. And essentially the whole business model came down to getting the cost of launching into space

low enough. And I think they were talking about $600 a kilo, if I remember correctly, and they're talking about the new starship getting it down. to as low as potentially $10 a queue, I think he said. Does the same thing apply here where the cost of getting the stuff into space is a big obstacle at the moment? And how do you overcome that if it is? Absolutely.

That's been the number one reason why space-based solar power has not seen the light of day yet. It's because historically, the cost of expendable launches when you throw away a launcher after using it once has meant that even if you could build these things, technically, it would have cost it so much to build it that the price of the electricity you'd have to charged your users would be so high, no one would buy that electricity. This was the conclusion in the 1970s by the big study done by NASA and the Department of Energy in the U.S., which first took a thorough look at space-based solar power because of the oil crisis in the 70s. They were rushing around looking for alternative sources in space-based solar power and nuclear, were two big topics in development then. But the conclusion was with the technology that they had

At the time, the type of launch technologies that they had and manufacturing technologies, it just wasn't economically viable. And that's been the case since then until the more recent advent of reusable launches in the last 10 years, which has now proven that launch costs can be reduced by the use of reusable launches. And this is now going to be, this is a growing industry. There are many more players across the world who are getting into this space because it's been proven in the case of the Falcon 9, for example, from the US. So as more people work on reasonable launches, the competition will increase, the prices will drop. The availability of launch mass to orbit

will increase, but people are also working on much larger launches. So they're combining reusability with scale, putting up 100 tons of mass into orbit in one go or more. So once you bring all of these factors together, and we're not far away from seeing that now, it's really going to open up space to many applications, but it has been absolutely critical to space space solar power that this launch cost coming down situation has come about. So this is one of the main reasons why everyone is taking a much more closer look at space, space solar power now, that they weren't 10 or 15 years ago. So that's that's number one. And then the manufacturing costs as well, producing space hardware on a factory line rather than by hand, which we're seeing, for example,

with the Starlink constellation where factories are mass-producing satellites by the thousands. This is also a brand new thing, and that dramatically reduces the cost of the space hardware itself. The launch costs are definitely coming down. I think it's going to be easier to get things up in space. Once they're in space, these giant things are actually way easier to move than they are on Earth just because of the zero gravity. Has the idea of 3D printing stuff come up, and what's the status of that? If we could just figure out how to manufacture this stuff up there,

has it. Yeah, we're all on the future topics today. So in space manufacturing, that's what you're referring to. And absolutely, that's something that people are working on all around the world, because it solves a lot of problems of constraints of building things on Earth and then having to package them into a launcher and launch them and then assemble them. If you could just send the raw materials or basic parts up into space and then make them much more complicated or produce them in space, there's a lot of benefits to that. So people are working on developing those technologies and I think we'll see the first experiments being done in the coming years and of course being a even newer technology than assembly of pre-made structures in space. It'll take a little bit more

time to start to see big applications of that. So expect for space space space solar power, the initial designs will be done with prefabricated systems on Earth. But in the longer term, and don't forget, when you're talking about space solar power, it's not a single space mission or something like that. This is creating a whole new industry that will last. not just decades, but into the future. So it's the first iteration of space-based solar power, what the structures look like, how we do it, the types of launches we use,

whether or not we use in space manufacturing, that will all change in the future as technology gets better as we get better at doing these things and there's more investments. So I think we will start to see in later iterations in the future, parts of the space-based solar power system being manufactured in space. And if we really want to scale this up to the thousands of power plants

that will need, to provide a good fraction of the Earth's energy needs. There's a strong case for sourcing the materials from the moon to do this, and fabricating a lot of the hard wave of solar power plants on the surface of the moon and launching that into orbit around the Earth. Because actually, thanks to Newton's laws, it takes far less energy to get stuff from the surface of the moon into orbit of the Earth than from the surface of the Earth to that same orbit above the Earth.

Is that mass driver technology? That's one way. Magnets. That's one way you could do it, and that's concepts that have been around for quite some time to send either prefatic fabricator material or even raw material off the surface of the Earth, like in the High Frontier Book that you referred to, Mark, where raw material is sent to some place in space where there's a colony that receives it, a colony of people that receive it and turn it into parts for space-based solar power stations.

We actually did a study at ESA on the use of lunar resources for space-based solar power, and the conclusion of that was if we could do that, industrialize the moon and produce the parts for space-based solar power plants, then it would become the cleanest and cheapest energy technology for planet Earth, because it reduces the cost, because you don't have all that transportation costs, and it will be environmentally even cleaner than all of the launches coming from the Earth, which even if you make that each launch relatively clean, it's still going to have some environmental impact. And when you have tens of thousands of launches,

there will be a significant impact on the Earth's atmosphere. So that's how we would want to do it in the longer term if we're going to do this really at scale. I love these big ideas, Jeremy. Right, should we lighten the mood with some hotbones before you get into the economics, the serious business of how much this is all going to cost and how much is going to save us, Jeremy?

I think that's a great idea. I'd like to know Sanjay personally. So Sanjay, here's what we got. We're going to put 30 seconds on the clock. Don't worry, there's not a trap door that you fall through if you don't answer all of them in 30 seconds. But we're going to try and shoot for that, put 30 seconds on the clock. Mark's going to fire away.

And thinking fast, thinking slow, right, Mark? Thinking fast, thinking slow. Those the clock, Jeremy? Three, two, one, go. Arthur C. Clark or Philip K. C. Clark, I met him. Books or e-books? Books, definitely.

SpaceX or NASA? SpaceX. Favorite city to visit on holiday? What Alimpo where I'm from? Will AI take all our jobs? Yes or no? No. AGI or aliens, which is more likely?

Aliens. Good answer. Excellent. Outstanding. You were one second left on the clock. Sanjay, well done. Well, your last one could have been what book should everyone read, but the answer is the high front dish.

Hold it up, Jeremy. Oh, you're a way. So Jay, follow up question. What did you say to Arthur C. Clarke when you met him? Oh, I think he did a lot of the tall king. So I met him in Sri Lanka at his home in Colombo. years ago back in 2003. I didn't say, I was just awestruck because I had always had the ambition to

collect every single one of his books. I'm still working on it because he was prolific. Yeah, I, uh, and, by complete coincidence, I was, I was down in, in Sri Lanka on holiday and, uh, as part of the tour of the city, uh, we were taken past his house because it was a famous person in Colombo and the driver said, well, if you're really interested, why don't you go and ring the bell and see if he's home and say hi, just like that? And I said, nah, I can't do that. He said, go on. He's a nice guy. I'm sure he'll let you in if he's there. So rang the bell and

his aide came out and said that he was on some travels. He wasn't around, but he'd be back the following week. And because I was coming back through Colombo on my way out in that time frame, He said, yeah, give us a call. Here's his number and we'll arrange a meetup on your way back. So I did that. I gave him a call and that was a bit scary. He came on the line and a meeting. And he was instantly asking, do you know this person at NASA JPL?

Do you know that person? Because I was working in Mars exploration before. And he was, of course, fascinated by Mars exploration. And in fact, when I went into his office, he was pouring over some pictures that I recently come down from one of the Mars orbiters. Didn't say anything. I sat down. And then he just flipped over.

over one of these charts in front of me and said, what do you see there? And I couldn't make anything of it, really. It was just some picture. And he looked up with a glinted with its eye and said, that's Mars. It looked like some kind of alpine seam with snow and some trees, but actually it was surface of Mars. Yeah. Yeah, that was quite something. So last question on the Arthur C. Clark thing. So what book would you recommend to someone who's never read Arthur C. Clark

to be the rabbit hole into the world of Arthur C. Clark? Oh, it's got to be rendezvous with Rama, I think. The first of his Rama series, it's just one of those books where I simply could not put it down to eat or go to the bathroom or anything until I finish it. All right. So thanks for entertaining the hot buns and your amazing experience of chance with ringing a doorbell. That's amazing. Let's dive into a bit of the economics and a bit of the feasibility of this, because I know you led a lot of studies. you've been in this world for quite a while.

What are we looking at from an implementation standpoint? If you could just sketch it out from high level, like what it would take to do the, like a minimum viable product for space-based solar power, and what is the output of that look like with power delivery and quality and that sort of thing? There are a number of startups now in this field that are looking to produce a minimum viable product

to get investors interested in that early. steps where you might get some return on your investment as you scale up the systems to the much larger systems. And from what I've seen in the work that we've done, it looks like the sweet spot might be in the low tens of megawatts or so, where it's still a big challenge in terms of scale from anything we've built right now in space. For comparison, the International Space Station has the largest set of solar rays in space today, and that's generating 200.000. 140 kilowatts or so. So that's about a quarter of a megawatt.

So when you talk about 20 megawatts, it's still 100 times larger. But yet, that's a good step up on the way to the gigawatt scale. And it's quite a useful amount of power where you might find a number of customers that could be interested, whether it's the military or the mining sector, for example, and other kind of small users that might be willing to pay top dollar because necessarily because of the smaller scale,

it's going to be relatively more expensive than once it's scaled up, you get the benefits of scale in terms of reduced costs when you go bigger. So, real quick, I'd like to add some context to the 10 megawatt kind of level. So listeners, if you're just thinking about Fortune 100 businesses that have servers, network, storage, compute,

these data center facilities that support their businesses, on average, they're in that one to two megawatt, one to three megawatt footprint for their data centers. If you just think about that at scale, obviously now with AI, we're well past 10 megawatt facilities, 100 megawatt facilities. So just to add a little context as you talk through the numbers. Yeah. Yeah. And there are a lot of solar farms on earth, which are roughly in that scale as well, some tens of megawatts. So we know that that's a scale which the energy sector would be familiar with and that people could be interested in as an early market. And then once that's demonstrated and, you know, real customers are paying money for that

scale of power, I think that will be a step change in interest in the topic because it's essentially going to be proven from a technology point of view and that there's a commercial market. And then, of course, there's still a huge step up when you go for 20 megawatts to say 2 gigawatts. It's still 100 times bigger. So it may not be the next step. But I think most of the risks by then will be bought down and then it's a case of basically building a lot of hardware, doing a lot of launches and making much larger, larger. So if we look at this 10 megawatt use case, right, and we have the equipment put together, launched, put in place, assembled, stuff happening on the terrestrial level to convert it and distribute it. What sort of order of magnitude cost are we, I know it's

such a, so many things involved with that, but just order of magnitude cost, is it, $8 billion? Is it 10 billion? What does it look like? No, no, no. When you talk about tens of megawatts, those are, that's not going to be in the range of billions. That's going to be in the range of tens to hundreds of millions for, for the smaller scale initial systems. So when you, when you look at the, you know, ultimately what, what matters to investors in particular is how much you're going to be able to sell that energy for and how that compares with other sources of energy people might buy. So it's, They typically use what's called a levelized cost of electricity

to be able to compare the costs from different sources. If you're in the ballpark range of other similar energy sources, which can range from, you know, $30 or euros per megawatt hour of energy, up to, say, 150 or so, depending on whether it's solar and wind on one end and fossil fuels on the other hand, gas and nuclear as well. So that's the kind of range that you'd want to play in to be able to be considered from an economic point of view.

That was the main consideration. But it's important to remember because it's quite a large range that there's a reason for that and there's a different set of characteristics in terms of the energy you're providing depending on the technology that you're using. Solar and wind, for example, while it might be cheap on the one hand,

it's also variable and not reliable in terms of when you get it. So the price you can charge when you sell it to a user is then necessary also relatively low because its value is affected by its unreliability. On the other hand, if you have another source, which may be expensive to produce the energy, but because it produces reliable energy when you want it, when you need it, your user may be willing to pay more for that reliability depending on who they are. to lock it. So that's, that's an important thing which actually a lot of people who don't understand how the energy sector actually works in detail, in depth, don't realize that you're not comparing

like for like when you're looking at different energy sources from a cost, generation cost point of view, because they are different. I mean, it's like comparing an iPhone with a, you know, cheap substitute. One may be cheaper, but you don't say that there's no market for the iPhone because it's three times more. because you're getting something else from that. And there's a bunch of users that are willing to pay more for a different quality product. So, yeah, so the idea once this stuff all gets built, you've got to find users that are willing to pay the Delta

for that type of energy, not only to support the testing and implementation of it, but also to see the energy output that comes down. It's cleaner energy. It's more consistent. Really interesting. In your role, it's space energy insights, being an advocate for the community, kind of tying the, tying different people together, making

connections and supporting initiatives. What are some of the private companies out there that are trying to tackle this problem in little steps that you're most excited about? Yeah. So there's been quite a, quite a growth of private companies in recent years, especially in the last five years, particularly in the U.S., in the U.K., few in Europe, and there's some in China and Japan. Pan as well. So in terms of the ones that I'm quite familiar with, I would say two of the leading names in this space right now are space solar in the UK and a purchase solace in the US. And Virtue Solis actually has a little bit footprint in the UK as well. So they've been around for a few years and they are developing going straight for developing space space solar power at scale.

They're also a bunch of companies, and in fact, what's really topical for today is that one of the newest companies that have entered space-based solar power, the field of it. Only in October last year, this is called Etherflux in the US. And they just announced just yesterday that they've received $50 million in private investment as part of a series A round. And they're planning to have their first demonstrator in orbit already next year, a very small-scale system. Their concept is a little bit different to the ones others are pursuing in the sense that they are not going for larger individual systems, but distributing it as a consolation of smaller satellites and using laser as a source of wireless power delivery rather than radio frequencies, which most other concepts are based on. So in the difference between the optical laser, RF is preferred. RF and microwave is a little bit more preferred in that sense because it doesn't have as many

issues related to loss. Is that correct? Yes. So loss is one of them. All the studies since the 1970s have usually traded off these two different ways of getting power down. In fact, the third is, as I mentioned earlier, having a mirror in space and reflecting sunlight onto the ground. That's a third way to get energy down to the ground, which doesn't actually involve any conversion to electricity and then to something else and then back against. But in terms of whether to use radio frequency or lasers, most of the studies have always historically fallen back to the radio frequency approach for two main reasons. One, if you really want to deliver 24-7 weather independent power, which is one of the big plus points of space space sort of power, which is just simply impossible to get on the

surface of the Earth, then you need to do that in the radio frequency, a region of the, of the spectrum, because if you choose your frequency right, it has almost no absorption through the atmosphere, and it doesn't get reflected or absorbed by clouds and rain significantly. So it's really an all-weather, whole-conditioned way to get clean energy from space down to the Earth. You could alternatively use lasers, which have the benefit that your systems to send their power and receive that power can be much more compact because a laser beam can be, because of its higher frequency,

can be focused into a tighter beam than radio frequencies. So your receivers can be smaller. But if you do focus it highly, then you get into the problem of safety because then you've got a highly concentrated amount of energy and that could have safety issues

if it's pointed away from where it should be pointed. So from a space safety perspective in say public concern perspective, the use of radio frequencies, which are essentially the same frequencies as we use today for satellite communications and Wi-Fi. It's like sending Wi-Fi down from space to the Earth, but with a bit more power, somewhat more power than we have with Wi-Fi's in our home. But it's the same type of frequency. So we understand that technology really well, and this is why people have typically gone with radio frequency as a way to get the power down. However, for some

applications where, and the other thing with lasers is the loss issue because they'll get absorption and they get reflection and be completely blocked by clouds generally. So in parts of the earth, like where I live in the Netherlands, in Europe, today is a really sunny day, so that's great, but that's not always the case, then if you want to offer reliable service of energy from space and lasers are probably going to be very challenging to show your customers, you're going to be able to provide that reliably. On the other hand, if you're providing power down to Chile or the Middle least or something like that where clouds are not typically an issue, you might have a good business case with an alternative way to get that energy down.

So it depends. I brought up the safety thing. And I think Mark was going to hand on that too. But before we go into like the public perception and some of the policies and regulations that could maybe affect the adoption of some of this stuff. So if you have an array up in space, it's focusing beams down, it's it's RF based or microwave based. And say it gets knocked out of position and it basically sends that beam a little bit off course.

it's going to be a little less troublesome than that laser getting knocked off course. Is that correct? Yes and no. So first of all, it's not going to get knocked off course because that's just impossible by design. So with space-based sort of power systems, people have been thinking of this from the beginning, how to make it intrinsically safe by design, because otherwise you're going to be really challenged convincing the regulators and the public that you've designed a safe system. So almost all the designs today use a system where,

the pointing of the beam from the satellite to the receiver is determined by a beam that comes up from the receiver to the satellite, which we call a pilot beam, right? And there's receivers on the satellite, which are looking out for this beam that comes up from the receiver, and only when the satellite and the receiver are pointed exactly to each other, does the satellite actually focus the beam down into a concentrated beam towards that receiver.

And if it doesn't receive the pilot beam from the ground because it's off-pointed, then the focusing of the beam doesn't happen. And so the microwaves, the radio waves just basically spread out across space, across the face of the earth at very low intensity. Is that real action? So like, as it comes, so if it, if it's off, it just shuts off or it disperses the real-time control loop such, because what the antennas that they're using are transmitters, which are actively controlled in order to basically put together a large number of individual beams

into a single one. They call it a phased array antenna. And this is an active process where you have to time the beaming of the power from each of these million or more panels together in such a way that it creates the correct shape and intensity and direction down to the earth. And if that's not done right, then the power just goes everywhere at low intensity and that's not going to cause any safety issue, but you're obviously not going to get the energy down to the receiver where you want to get it to. So this pilot beam acts as a safety interlock to make sure that the beam is always and can only be pointed in a concentrated way at a receiver. And so this is a major failsafe designed into the system. So Sabine Hosenfelder on her video where she has a chicken

flying across the sky and the beams coming down and they roast the chicken, that's not at all. So that's a different issue because, of course, when the beam is correctly pointed down to the receiver, there's still going to be things that are going to be passing through the beam, like satellites, for example, on the way, because we're going to have this solar power plant thousands of kilometers away. So there'll be satellites passing through. There'll be planes, there'll be birds. And you're not going to cut off the beam, switch off the beam each time something passes otherwise you won't have reliable power. The other. The other safety aspect that's built into the design of the system is that the power intensity, which is

what really matters, is deliberately set to a level which is not harmful to things that will pass through the beam. So even though we could, even with the radio frequencies, concentrate to the beam to thousands of watts per square meter, at those levels, that may be harmful to things that spend a lot of time in the beam. And it can also affect the ionosphere of the at the top part of the atmosphere where there's a lot of charge particles that can interact with the radio frequency that comes through the atmosphere.

And if the intensity is too high, then you can get unwanted interactions that happen there in absorption of the beam as well. So for these reasons, everyone designs their systems to use relatively low power beams, typically a few hundred watts per square meter. And at that frequency and that intensity, the studies that have been done,

the research has been done so far, suggest the interaction with the atmosphere is benign, and that those low power levels, ecologically, and flora and fauna will not be affected as well in a detrimental way. I want a silly question. It's all fair. Where's your card? Show me your card. Here's my card. The first part is the question, is this a race or is this a collaboration? I saw that Japan has quite a lot of companies, the USA, Europe, UK, China.

Obviously, I doubt they're sharing much of their information. But is it a race or is it collaboration? And the second part to that question is, you've mentioned the UK, a few times. times and I'm English, I'm from the UK. Is this a one of the silver linings, if such, as the thing is this, of Brexit for the UK where they're able to push ahead in space-based solar power at the expense of Europe? I'm not sure I want to answer that last one. So is it a race?

The way I always talk about that is really we are all in a race against time when it comes to mitigating climate change. So I think that's the big race to be able to get off our dirty energy sources and get to a clean system as soon as possible and insufficient energy for the world as well. And given that everyone is still at relatively early stage, I think there's a lot more cooperation than competition going on. And the community is still relatively small. Pretty much everyone knows everyone. Meet relatively regularly in international forums and exchange the status of what we're doing. And, you know, everyone is having the similar struggles, not just from an engineering technology

point of view, but the public perception and the interest from investors and the energy sector and trying to get the funding in and trying to get the world to wake up basically to the potential of this and treat it like it should, which is it's got huge potential. It should be receiving a similar amount of investment as all of the other major future energy technologies that are out there today that are getting vast amounts of investment. So from that point of view, everyone's success is the whole communities and the whole field success right now. And we're all helping each other as much as we can to grow, I think. Great. Good news. So the political barriers to entry into space.

Maybe the culture follows the policy. So it is the first thing to change the politician's mind or to change the culture of a largest mind inside or outside in? Yeah. Yeah. So typically these things are done in a steer. way. So the technology is worked on first. And then the politicians are engaged to try to get a large amount of funding to be able to start to build these things up at a larger scale. And then regulations and public and stuff are brought into it to make sure that they're on board at the time such a technology was ready to be deployed. Now with the climate crisis, I feel we need to tackle because we're in a climate emergency, we need to tackle all of these things in parallel.

Because if we did the business as usual approach, new energy technologies don't come about every day. There's only been half a dozen or so in the last century in terms of energy technologies that really have come into our everyday life. So it's a big thing to introduce a new energy technology into the terrestrial system. And everything, each step takes a lot of time if we're going to do it seriously and we don't have that time. So it's about doing it all together. And that's the question about the political barriers. that the problem with this topic is it's not well known within the energy sectors or governments dealing with energy policy.

Those who may have heard about it probably have not looked into it in the enough depth to really understand what it offers and might just quickly dismiss it as another type of thing like fusion or even further away. But not realizing that the only reason it's far away is because nobody's actually investing in space-based solar power and like all of these other technologies. And actually, we would be ready to do this in the next decade

if the proper amount of the development funding was put on it. So one of the big things I want to do through this new consultancy is to try to raise awareness, particularly in Europe, but internationally, the two governments about the potential for the technology and try to get them to really look deeply into it and trade it off with all of the other technologies that they have planned for their future energy policy. And the way to do that, to get their attention,

and this comes back to the other point about, culture and maybe the end user is to get the energy sector to really start shouting from the rooftops to the governments to say, hey, you guys should be investing public funds to de-risk this technology and create this new industry. And then we'll come in once it's shown to be viable. We'll come in with our private capital and scale this thing up. But like with every other energy technology, it needed government help to get going, to get onto its own feet before the private sector was willing to take all the risk of then commercializing it at scale. And that's not, that's not happening today that government input is simply not there at the level it should be.

And this is where I'm trying to get the energy sector to basically come together, speak with a louder voice, show them how interesting this is for them and get them knocking on the doors on the holes of power and say, guys, put some public funds into this and then we can, you know, really create something new. And if you're disrupt or curious mind and you don't work in the energy industry. Take pen, take a paper, and write a letter to your local politician. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, get... Sanjay, this has been great. There's a lot of clarity out of this and will generate some interest. Thank you for thinking on paper with us. If you're listening, I think you check out

a few other episodes. We're having some common threads between our space episodes of late Jeremy where there's a few common challenges that need to be overcome to get to where we want to be, most notably launch costs. But also, people's bandwidth, people's ability. to pay attention and think about these technologies on a, on a deeper level because it's very easy to be, to be not fit, to be fearful or to think that it's not serious or to kick the can down the road and it's like, okay, we're talking about building data centers in space or solar power, data space based solar power. This is for the future. But it isn't for the future, is it? I think we can all see, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, we are slowly cooking ourselves

and we have to invest and we have to move and we have to build now for the future. Because if we wait and we wait and we wait, then everyone knows that that's too late, don't they? So wake up. I agree. If a crisis like we're in is not the time to look at all possible options, then when is? Exactly. And you're absolutely right. Too many people think these seemingly crazy concepts are just crazy at the superficial level and don't look into what could this really offer and why is it worth working on.

I think once you look more deeply into it than your idea. start to open a lot more. Don't wait until all the oils run out. What can our listeners do right now to jump in, to learn a little bit more? Is there a link? Is there a YouTube video that's out there that would spark people's interest beyond Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and Gerard O'Neill's, the High Frontier, which I highly recommend engaging with both of those individuals.

But Sanjay, where would you lead everybody? Yeah, there's a lot of good resources, just Googling space-based solar power and yeah, even ESA's efforts in the last years. We've put a lot of material out there to try to communicate this with the public, including some cool videos, and there's a lot of cool videos explaining how space-based sort of power works and why it's important. So encourage folks to have a look at those.

And especially if you think after watching one of them, now this is crazy, doesn't make sense. Do try to look into it a little bit more deeply to see why is it that so many clever people have been working on this continuously for, the last 50 years trying to make it happen. There's got to be something there. So put that extra effort in to see what it's all about. They will do.

They think on paper. That's why they're here. They need to ask and cry Louis-Jeremy. We don't. Thanks again so much for joining us.