Solar farms here on earth are generating an increasing amount of power for the grid, but they suffer from some obvious problems. They can’t generate power when it’s cloudy or at night. And they are very far away from what’s actually generating the power: the sun. But transport that structure all the way up through the Earth’s atmosphere and into outer space, and it could beam a constant supply of power down to Earth. That’s the big idea being presented to the European Space Agency (ESA) in November 2022, as part of the sci-fi sounding Solaris project.
Image: ©European SPS Tower concept/courtesy ESA
