Japan poised to make history as the first country to transmit solar power from space to Earth

Forget rooftop panels, Japan is ready to take solar power to space.

The country is gearing up to test its space-based solar power station, which is designed to beam power back to Earth.

The project, dubbed OHISAMA, is named after the Japanese word for ‘sun’.

And while it won’t be powering cities just yet, it’s an exciting leap towards clean, round-the-clock energy straight from orbit.

VISIT SBX CARS – View live supercar auctions powered by Supercar Blondie

The solar power will be converted into microwaves

Koichi Ijichi, and adviser at Japan Space Systems, laid out the details of the project at the International Conference on Energy from Space, held in London in April 2024.

The test spacecraft will be compact, weighing just 400 pounds.

Using a 22-square-foot solar panel, it will collect sunlight in orbit and store the energy in an onboard battery.

Because spacecraft travel very quickly, at speeds close to 17,400mph, the antennas on Earth have to be spread out over 25 miles.

The antennas also have to be strategically placed at a distance of three miles from each other to receive the energy, which will be transmitted via microwaves.

Space solar farms can produce energy all day

It may seem too futuristic to be true, and that is because the project is still in its infancy.

The satellite is only projected to transmit about 1 kilowatt of power from an altitude of 250 miles.

This translates to having enough energy to run a small household appliance, like a dishwasher, for an hour.

Clearly, this is not sufficient for commercial use, yet the Japanese researchers are hopeful that the test will be a step forward.

Still, Japan has been testing this technology for years, and they’ve had good results thus far.

In 2015, they wirelessly transmitted 1.8 kilowatts of power over 55 meters, while later tests managed to send 10 kilowatts over 500 meters.

Japan hopes to one day launch huge solar power satellites into geostationary orbit, each capable of producing up to one gigawatt of clean energy.

A gigawatt translates to one million kilowatts, which is certainly a big step up.

This would power hundreds of thousands homes, and be a game changer for disaster zones, remote areas, or any place where reliable electricity is hard to come by.

The best part about space solar panels is that they can collect energy day and night, regardless of weather conditions, unlike Earth-based solar farms.

While it’s still early days, and challenges remain, Japan’s OHISAMA project is proving that the future of clean energy might just be out of this world.

The post Japan poised to make history as the first country to transmit solar power from space to Earth appeared first on Supercar Blondie.