Sep 01 2009

Japan Surges Ahead With Space Solar Power

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

The United States beat the USSR in the race to the moon. But in a space race with far bigger stakes--the race to deploy and harvest virtually unlimited space solar power--Japan is showing much greater commitment.

Bloomberg News reports today that Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp. are joining more than a dozen other companies in a $21 billion Japanese project "intending to build a giant solar-power generator in space within three decades and beam electricity to earth."

The project is being led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the country's trade ministry.

Orbiting arrays of photovoltaic panels will gather solar energy, which will be beamed to earth as radio waves, then converted back to electrical energy for distribution over the grid. Unlike terrestrial solar power, the energy would be available almost continuously.

Kensuke Kanekiyo, managing director of the Institute of Energy Economics, a government research body, told Bloomberg, "It sounds like a science-fiction cartoon, but solar power generation in space may be a significant alternative energy source in the century ahead as fossil fuel disappears."

In the United States, government agencies have long studied and even endorsed the concept of space solar power, but have never funded serious R&D efforts. A report by the U.S. National Security Space Office in 2007 concluded that space solar power has "enormous potential for energy security, economic development [and] improved environmental stewardship," but said it "'falls through the cracks' of federal bureaucracies, and has lacked an organizational advocate within the US Government." 

In Japan, on the other hand, the government is serious about making clean space solar power a significant contributor to the resource-poor country's energy mix.

JAXA plans first to launch a demonstration satellite to beam tens of kilowatts of power back to earth by 2015; then to demonstrate robotic assembly techniques; next to build a major prototype in geosynchronous orbit; and finally to deploy a commercial-scale system in space by 2030.

As one of their top scientists told EnergyBiz magazine last year, the goal is to start generating a gigawatt of power--roughly the output of a nuclear power plant--within two decades. "We expect space solar power panel systems will be competitive with the existing power plants in 20 to 30 years, if the space transportation cost is considerably reduced," he said. 

PG&E and Solaren Corporation announced the first commercial space solar power deal in April. But Solaren, a startup based in Southern California led by aerospace veterans, must raise funds, complete the necessary R&D, and launch a working system into orbit by 2016 without the benefit of government support. "We are on track to meet the objectives we set with PG&E," said Solaren CEO Gary Spirnak.

India, too, is actively studying the potential of space solar power. It is developing an inexpensive reusable launch vehicle that could give "mankind the benefit of space solar-power stations in geostationary and other orbits," former President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam told an audience of international space experts in Boston two years ago.

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