The project has been funded and developed under the Pentagon, the Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund (OECIF) and the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. In January, Jaffe and PRAM co-leader Chris DePuma, released the first results of their experiments in IEEE Journal of Microwaves, which showed "the experiment is working," Jaffe said. The mission of the US' X-37B space plane is shrouded in secrecy, with the PRAM experiment being one of the few details known of its purpose. "On Earth, we have this pesky gravity, which is helpful in that it keeps things in place, but is a problem when you start to build very large things, as they have to support their own weight," Jaffe said. There are some advantages to building in space. "And those are, in the last 10 years, finally starting to come down." "Building hardware for space is expensive," he said. "You can send power to Chicago and a fraction of a second later, if you needed, send it instead to London or Brasilia."īut a key factor to be proven, Jaffe said, is economic viability. "The unique advantage the solar power satellites have over any other source of power is this global transmissibility," Jaffe said. If the project develops into huge kilometers-wide space solar antennae, it could beam microwaves that would then be converted into fuel-free electricity to any part of the planet at a moment's notice. The unit has yet to actually send power directly back to Earth, but that technology has already been proven. "Some visions have space solar matching or exceeding the largest power plants today - multiple gigawatts - so enough for a city," he said. ![]() It could contribute to the Earth's largest grid networks, Jaffe said. ![]() That's about enough to power a tablet computer.īut the project envisages an array of dozens of panels and, if scaled up, its success could revolutionize both how power is generated and distributed to remote corners of the globe. The latest experiments show that the 12x12-inch panel is capable of producing about 10 watts of energy for transmission, Jaffe told CNN. "We're getting a ton of extra sunlight in space just because of that," said Paul Jaffe, a co-developer of the project. ![]() Blue light diffuses on entry into the atmosphere, which is why the sky appears blue. The panel is designed to make best use of the light in space, which doesn't pass through the atmosphere, and so retains the energy of blue waves, making it more powerful than the sunlight that reaches Earth.
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