‘Change typhoon intensity and path’: China team mulls hitting cyclones with space beam
Scientist Duan Baoyan says the Zhuri project could also act as a ‘space-based power bank’ to charge satellites and other facilities
“If the energy output were high enough, it could alter regional atmospheric circulation and change a typhoon’s intensity and path,” Duan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Xidian University in Xian, northwestern China, wrote in state-run People’s Daily on Monday.
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He added that the plant could also charge satellites, space stations and deep-space probes, allowing them to operate for longer and travel farther. “Future space internet networks or even lunar bases may rely on this ‘space-based power bank’ technology,” he wrote.
First proposed by Duan and his colleagues in 2013, the Zhuri (“chasing the sun”) project ultimately envisions building a kilometre-scale circular solar power station in geostationary orbit, about 36,000km (22,370 miles) above Earth, capable of generating gigawatt-level electricity.
In 2022, his team built a 75-metre-tall test tower on campus to simulate the entire process on Earth, including tracking the sun, concentrating light, converting it into electricity, turning that electricity into microwaves, beaming it across a distance, and converting it back into electricity at a receiving antenna.
Since then, the ground-based system has reached new technical milestones, including what Duan described as “one-to-many transmission”, allowing a single microwave transmitter to send power to multiple moving receivers at the same time rather than just one fixed target.