Clean Energy From Space
Researchers at Caltech are turning a once-considered sci-fi technology into a reality — transforming collected sunlight from space into electricity and beaming it to Earth, to provide a global supply of clean and affordable energy.
"This is an extraordinary and unprecedented project," says Harry Atwater , an SSPP researcher and Otis Booth Leadership Chair of Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science. "It exemplifies the boldness and ambition needed to address one of the most significant challenges of our time, providing clean and affordable energy to the world."
Transcript
00:00:02 the space solar project is going to change the baby think about energy the space based solar power initiative is a very daring effort to provide power to remote locations on earth by collecting solar power from the Sun collected in space converted to energy send it down to earth via microwave waves so that we can have constant power from the Sun on the earth even when it's nighttime
00:00:29 project is really a unique collaboration between three professors that are in distinct fields integrating those three fields ends up enabling a solution that is so unique and so impactful it makes it exciting every day I work in professor Pellegrino's lab our part in this process is to develop very light structures that can support in the solar cells and all the other equipment for
00:00:55 the power transfer for that we develop ultralights composite structures which are also foldable into a very tight volume so that they can fit inside a launch vehicle my work focuses on the solar cell the photovoltaic aspects of that we are designing solar panels that have a power-to-weight ratio that is fifty to a hundred times higher than any other current state-of-the-art space
00:01:20 solar panels much much higher than what you would find for terrestrial solar panels in professor Hyde Ramirez group we research the electronics that convert the DC power and convert it to RF power and send it on to earth and usable form so it can be recovered one of the brilliant aspects of this project is that we've made a design that is both integrated and very modular by
00:01:44 integrating everything onto an IC as well as integrating the antennas onto the lightweight structure and make it one holistic system that does everything at once helps you tremendously to reduce the weight and reduce the cost to a point where it's actually competitive with earth-based utility companies we have a small sub unit that we call the tile and that's repeated identically
00:02:08 across the entire area of the array a spacecraft would have many of these all of them would in unison to produce a large amount of energy we just had a very exciting milestone a few months ago where for the first time we developed hardware that integrated all three of the technologies that were developing and we've demonstrated that you can receive power
00:02:30 from a solar simulator and convert it to energy and sent that power and receive it at a distance away at Caltech we we approach these problems very fundamentally and that inherently changes the answers that we come up with we have the audacity to attempt some of this non-traditional approaches and and that's kind of what you need if you want to have any hope of achieving the
00:02:55 performance targets we're aiming at this is a project which is what Caltech really excels you're working on cutting-edge problems you can't Google the solution and professor Jim area has seen a lot of problems but he's always said to help you professor Atwater has a tremendous optimism which makes him very fun and stimulating to work for professor Pellegrino himself
00:03:20 inspires a culture of problem solving which is very rewarding to work with and these people are going to lead a revolution which has never been done and this revolution will make our world a better place we'll be having energy on demand anywhere anytime anyplace you