{"id":139379,"date":"2022-05-15T16:02:57","date_gmt":"2022-05-15T21:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/is-solar-energy-from-outer-space-in-our-future-part-one-building-a-geosynchronous-solar-power-plant"},"modified":"2022-05-15T16:02:57","modified_gmt":"2022-05-15T21:02:57","slug":"is-solar-energy-from-outer-space-in-our-future-part-one-building-a-geosynchronous-solar-power-plant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/is-solar-energy-from-outer-space-in-our-future-part-one-building-a-geosynchronous-solar-power-plant","title":{"rendered":"Is Solar Energy from Outer Space in Our Future? \u2014 Part One: Building a Geosynchronous Solar Power Plant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/is-solar-energy-from-outer-space-in-our-future-part-one-building-a-geosynchronous-solar-power-plant.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Today a state-of-the-art solar panel on Earth can convert between 20 to 30% of the energy it collects from sunlight into electricity. At night solar panels here contribute nothing. But in space with nothing to block the Sun, that same Earth-based solar panel becomes thirteen times more efficient. And that is enough of an incentive to consider solar power from space.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>The Chinese and UK models are massive arrays located in geosynchronous orbit while continuously beaming energy to receiving stations here on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>The US model is different using a constellation of solar power generating satellites. These would be in relatively low orbits and interconnected to form a mesh network. The total network would generate continuous energy beaming it to the surface even when a portion of it gets blocked when the satellites enter the night side of the planet.<\/p>\n<p>In this two-part posting, we look at the Chinese and UK models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today a state-of-the-art solar panel on Earth can convert between 20 to 30% of the energy it collects from sunlight into electricity. At night solar panels here contribute nothing. But in space with nothing to block the Sun, that same Earth-based solar panel becomes thirteen times more efficient. And that is enough of an incentive [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":667,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2028,1633,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satellites","category-solar-power","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/667"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}