China aims to use space-based solar energy station to harvest sun’s rays to help meet power needs

Support for the unconventional orbiting solar programme jumped after China announced its 2060 carbon neutral target

Civilian and military researchers will look at applications for the technology amid concerns about radiation and the potential for beams misfired from space

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China aims to have a 1 megawatt solar energy station in space by 2030, according to a government plan. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 5:00am, 17 Aug 2021Updated: 12:11pm, 17 Aug 2021

With more than a third of days marred by fog all year round, Chongqing city in southwestern China is not the ideal place for a solar power plant. But soon it will have the nation’s first experimental facility to test a revolutionary technology allowing China to send, and receive, a powerful energy beam from space in about a decade, according to scientists involved in the project.

Harvesting energy from the sun and beaming it to Earth using huge infrastructure in orbit has been regarded as science fiction, but according to a plan by the Chinese government, the nation will put a 1 megawatt solar energy station in space by 2030.

And by 2049, when the People’s Republic of China celebrates its 100th anniversary, the total power capacity of the plant or plants would increase to 1 gigawatt, the equivalent of the current largest nuclear power reactor.

After breaking ground in Heping village, Bishan district, three years ago, construction of the 100-million-yuan (US$15.4 million) ground testing facility for the national space solar-power programme stopped, in part because of debates about cost, feasibility and safety of the technology.

The project resumed in June, according to the district government’s website.

Zhong Yuanchang, an electrical engineering professor involved in the project with Chongqing University, was quoted in the Beijing-based China Science Daily on Monday saying construction of the facility would be finished by the end of this year, meeting a tight deadline.

An intensive energy beam would need to penetrate the cloud efficiently and hit a ground station directly and precisely. Researchers at the Bishan facility will work on these and other projects.

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