
China leads plans to build space based solar power station

Sopuruchi Onwuka, with agency reports
As the race to locate more facilities in the orbit gets intense, China has begun working on plans to be the first to take a space for its gargantuan orbital solar farm that would harness more intense sun rays for transmission to earth based electricity generators.

According to reports surveyed by The Oracle Today, the project will entail floating a huge array of solar panels that are expected to collect more energy in a year than ‘all the oil on Earth.’
The project, according to reports, would put China ahead of other European countries and the United States which have been also working on the ambition to transmit more intense solar rays from the space to earth.
The U.S. companies Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, the European Space Agency, and Japan’s JAXA space agency have been investigating the technology; and JAXA is reportedly scheduling the launch of a small, proof-of-concept satellite this year to assess its feasibility.
As the country pushes through with some of the most ambitious energy projects as the world drifts from fossil fuels, Chinese scientists announced that the enormous kilometer wide solar power station in space would beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves.
Components of the orbital solar farm, according to the project design, would be lofted to a geostationary orbit above Earth using super-heavy rockets.
The orbital solar farm has been described as Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth, referencing China’s massive hydroelectric power station that would be propelled by the biggest dam to be build on earth.
The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze River in central China is the world’s largest hydropower project and generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year.
According to one NASA scientist, the dam is so large that, if completely filled, the mass of the water contained within would lengthen Earth’s days by 0.06 microseconds.
The new project, according to lead scientist Long Lehao, the chief designer of China’s Long March rockets, would be “as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.”
“This is an incredible project to look forward to,” Long added during a lecture in October hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), as reported by the South China Morning Post.
“The energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth.”
Despite recent advances in the cheapness and efficiency of solar power, the technology still faces some fundamental limitations — such as intermittent cloud cover and most of the atmosphere absorbing solar radiation before it hits the ground.
Scientists have proposed a number of Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) technologies which would continuously collect and transmit energy from sunlight in space, where it is 10 times more intense than at Earth’s surface.
But building an appropriately giant array would take many launches, meaning that most proposals failed to get off the ground.
To overcome this challenge, Long and his team are working on the development of the Long March-9 (CZ-9) reusable heavy-lift rocket, which will have a lift capacity of at least 150 tons (136 metric tons).
Besides being used for satellites, the rocket will also be key to China’s plans to reach the moon — where it wants to build an international lunar research base by 2035.