Solar power from space help solve our energy needs, In late November, a top-level meeting of European science ministers will convene in Paris. Their job is to decide the next priorities for the European Space Agency (Esa), of which the UK is still a member, and one of the items on their list to consider is a proposal for testing the feasibility of building commercial power stations in orbit.
These huge satellites would bask in the sunlight, converting it to power and beaming it down to Earth to be fed into the power grid. The proposed project, known as Solaris, would determine whether the idea can contribute to Europe’s future energy security – or if it is all still pie in the sky If the study gets the go-ahead, it will be like coming home for the space industry, which has always been at the forefront of solar power development. A year after the Russians launched the battery-powered Sputnik 1 in 1957, the Americans launched Vanguard 1. solar power from space help solve our energy needs, This was the fourth satellite in orbit and the first to generate its power using solar energy. Since that time, solar panels have become the primary way of powering spacecraft, which has helped to drive research. Vanguard 1’s solar cells converted just 9% of the captured sunlight into electricity. Today, the efficiency has more than doubled, and continues to increase, while the cost of fabrication has been falling. It’s a winning formula. “The cost of solar has been decreasing rapidly over the past 20 years, and faster than most players in the industry expected,” says Jochen Latz, a partner at management consultant McKinsey & Company. So much so, that in the Middle East and Australia, solar power is now the cheapest way to generate electricity. According to Latz, as the technology continues to develop, this will become true in the mid-latitude countries too.
“In 2050, we expect more than 40% of the energy in the EU to come from solar power – if the countries achieve their committed targets,” says Latz. That would make solar power the single largest contributing energy source to the EU. However, there are obvious problems that need solutions if we are to fully utilise solar panels on Earth. For one thing, what do we do at night? In May, Ned Ekins-Daukes, associate professor at the school of photovoltaic and renewable energy engineering at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and his team of researchers demonstrated a solar cell that could generate electricity from the emission of infrared rather than from the absorption of sunlight. This works perfectly at night because the Earth stores energy from the sun in the form of heat, which it then radiates back into space as infrared radiation. The prototype device is based on the same kind of technology used in night-vision goggles and at present it can only generate a few milliwatts of power, but Ekins-Daukes sees the potential. solar power from space help solve our energy needs, “This is the beginning – it’s the world’s first demonstration of thermal radiative power,” he says, indicating that the team is aiming for a finished product that is “10,000 times more powerful”. At those levels, it is possible that a rooftop installation of such devices, probably fabricated in some way as an additional layer to conventional solar panels, would capture enough energy to power the house overnight – that is, keeping the fridge, wifi router and so on running. While that is a modest saving for each household, multiplied across a country’s population, it becomes significant.
Source: This news is originally published by theguardian