Solar energy, the European Space Agency’s plan to produce it in orbit

Whether it’s deserts, unsightly parking lots, channels or even of sunny lakeswhen they install solar panels from time to time the clouds get in the way and every day the sun will have to set. No problem, at least for the European Space Agency (ESA): just take them into space.

ESA recently announced a new exploration program called Solariswhose objective is to understand whether it is feasible, from an economic and technological point of view, launch solar energy facilities into orbituse them to harness the sun’s energy and then bring it to Earth.

Stop intermittently

If the project is successful, by 2030 Solaris could start generating always available solar energy directly in space, which could represent the 10-15 percent of the total energy used in Europe, contributing to the European Union’s (EU) goal of ₂₂zero net emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) by 2050. “Let’s think about the climate crisis and the need to find solutions. What could space do to help mitigate climate change and not just monitor it from above as we have done in recent decades?”asks Sanjay Vijendran, who leads the initiative and also plays a leading role in ESA’s program on the exploration of Mars.

According to Vijendran, the key factor behind Solaris is the need to have clean and continuous sources of energy. Unlike fossil fuels and nuclear energy, solar and wind they are intermittent: Even the sunniest solar parks are idle most of the time. It will not be possible to store massive amounts of energy from renewable sources until the technology that powers batteries improves.

However, according to Vijendran, space solar installations they could generate power more than 99 percent of the time (In the remaining 1 percent or so, the Earth would come between the sun and the plants, blocking out the light).

The program – which has nothing to do with the homonymous science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem – is considered a “preparatory” project: this means that ESA has already completed a pilot study, but is not yet ready for large-scale development. Solaris plans to design an in-orbit technology demonstration, to be launched in the 2030s, and to build a scaled-down version of a space-based solar power plant in the middle of the next decade, which would then be scaled up. For now, ESA researchers will start studying how to assemble the modules of a large solar plant by means of robots, for example in orbit geostationary at an altitude of about 35 thousand kilometers. In this way, the structure would remain constantly suspended above a particular point on our planet, regardless of the Earth’s rotation.