A skeptic’s take on beaming power to Earth from space - Why we shouldn’t try to stick solar plants where the sun always shines

For decades, enthusiasm for the possibility of drawing limitless, mostly clean power from the one fusion reactor we know works reliably—the sun—has run hot and cold.

Even space-solar advocates have recognized that success clearly hinges on something that cannot be engineered: sustained political will to invest, and keep investing, in a multidecade R&D program that ultimately could yield machines that can’t put electricity on the grid. In that respect, beamed power from space is like nuclear fusion, except at least 25 years behind.

The U.S. and European space agencies have recently released detailed technical analyses of several space-based solar-power proposals... These reports make for sobering reading.

Electricity made this way, NASA reckoned in its 2024 report, would initially cost 12 to 80 times as much as power generated on the ground, and the first power station would require at least $275 billion in capital investment. Ten of the 13 crucial subsystems required to build such a satellite—including gigawatt-scale microwave beam transmission and robotic construction of kilometers-long, high-stiffness structures in space—rank as “high” or “very high” technical difficulty, according to a 2022 report to ESA by Frazer-Nash, a U.K. consultancy. Plus, there is no known way to safely dispose of such enormous structures, which would share an increasingly crowded GEO with crucial defense, navigation, and communications satellites, notes a 2023 ESA study by the French-Italian satellite maker Thales Alenia Space.