The Sun will eventually burn up and expand, taking our solar system with it. But before that happens, Japan and JAXA, the country's space agency, want to find a way to capture solar energy and use it on Earth. The answer may come in 2025, when Japan plans to send solar rays to Earth.
Solar power has proven to be a very reliable source of renewable energy. The only drawback is cloud cover, nighttime, and other elements that make it difficult for the solar panels to absorb much-needed sunlight and convert it to electricity. But what if you could eliminate all these problems? What if you could transmit the sun's energy directly from space without a second thought?
According to a Nikkei report, a Japanese public-private partnership will attempt to transport solar power from space within just two years, in 2025. The project is led by Kyoto University professor Naoki Shinohara, who has been working on projects based in solar energy since 2009.
In doing so, the team will launch a small satellite into orbit and then emit power from the Earth's array. If successful, we will have the ability to radiate energy indefinitely (or at least indefinitely for the next few hundred billion years).
It's an interesting idea, and it's been proposed to some degree since the late 1960s. But building a system that can properly harness solar energy and then safely deliver it to Earth is a tall order. Since it was first proposed in 1968, several countries, including the United States and China, have tried to build such systems, but none have come close.
The big challenge here is not just showing that you can do it. According to Engadget, building a device capable of producing 1 gigawatt of electricity (the power of a single nuclear reactor) would cost up to $7 billion, making the plan to harvest solar energy from space more science fiction than reality. Still, it's an interesting idea.
