By Haley Zaremba of OilPrice.com
Space-based solar power just got another powerful vote of confidence. The United States Department of Defense just inked a contract with solar energy company Overview Energy to “design, build, and test a homing beacon that will enable its space-based solar energy system to accurately beam power from orbit to receiving solar arrays on Earth,” according to a brand new report from Interesting Engineering.
The idea is that solar panels would orbit the Earth, collecting sunlight straight from the source and then beaming it back down to Earth either through powerful lasers or microwave beams, depending on the technology being applied.
Putting solar panels into outer space would yield a litany of benefits. Critically, unlike terrestrial models, the sun would never set on these solar panels, allowing them to generate clean energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This would solve an enormous issue in the clean energy sector, which is seeing increasing instances of wasted energy and even negative energy prices as peak production hours and peak demand hours are inevitably misaligned, and energy storage capacities have lagged far behind productive capacity.
And intermittency is not the only major challenge to the traditional solar power sector that space-based solar would be able to sidestep completely. Industr
