Japan will try to transmit solar energy from space, as early as 2025

CTOnews.com, May 29-Japan and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have spent decades trying to realize the possibility of transmitting solar energy from space.

The country made a breakthrough in 2015, when JAXA scientists successfully transmitted 1.8kW of electricity, equivalent to the energy required by an electric kettle, to a wireless receiver more than 50 metres away. Now, Japan is ready to take this technology a step further.

A public-private partnership in Japan will try to transmit solar energy from space as early as 2025, according to Nikkei. The project, led by Naoki Sakahara, a professor at Kyoto University who has been working on space solar energy since 2009, will try to deploy a series of small satellites in orbit. The satellites will then try to transmit the solar energy they collect to ground receiving stations hundreds of miles away.

The idea of using orbiting solar panels and microwaves to send energy to Earth was first proposed in 1968. The technology is attractive because it represents a potentially unlimited supply of renewable energy. In space, solar panels can collect energy day and night, and clouds are not a problem by using microwaves to transmit the electricity they produce. However, even if Japan successfully deploys a set of orbital solar panels, the technology is still a long way off. This is because it costs about $7 billion (CTOnews.com Note: about RMB 49.49 billion currently) to build an array that can generate 1 gigawatt of electricity (equivalent to the output of a nuclear reactor).