By James Pethokoukis and Ali Hajimiri

When you think of the future of clean energy, wind and solar might be the first things that come to mind. But when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, the need for alternative sources of power becomes apparent. From advanced geothermal to nuclear fusion, up-and-coming advancements may deliver a future of abundant, clean energy. One of the most ambitious ideas is space-based solar: orbiting solar panels that can beam energy to the Earth from space. Is this a viable energy solution . . . or a sci-fi pipe dream? To find out more, I asked Ali Hajimiri.

Ali is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, as well as Co-Director of the Space-Based Solar Power Project at Caltech.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: Space-based solar—putting solar panels in
space and beaming the energy to Earth—seems like a beautiful, elegant solution.
Why is it a good idea? What problem is it solving?

Hajimiri: The primary problem that it solves is being able
to get around the days and nights, the cycles of the weather—having
dispatchable power where you need it, when you need it, and as much as you
need. What we do allows you to send the power where you need at the time you
need—and you can even break it up into different proportions. You can say, “I
want to send 20 percent to New York, 30 percent to LA, and 40 percent to, I
don’t know, Seattle.”

The other thing is that there are places that don’t have the
power infrastructure. A good analogy to this is cell phones versus landlines.
Thirty years ago, there were places in Africa that didn’t have landlines. In
Sub-Saharan Africa today, there are these same places that still don’t have
landlines, but there they have leapfrogged to cell phones. So this way, you can
actually get to places that don’t have power.

What sorts of concerns are raised about this technology
and how do you deal with those?

There are people who think about, “Is it going to cause
interference?” and all those things. And those are the kinds of things that
we’ve learned how to deal with in radio systems. We have many different radio
systems working concurrently and seamlessly, and we don’t seem to have problems
with that.

There’s also another set of concerns some people raise. “Is
it going to fry birds flying overhead?” The answer is that the energy density
that anything, even in that beam spot, will get is comparable to what you get
from standing out in the sun—except for the fact that it’s what we call
non-ionizing. So [the sun’s rays] can cause cancer, but radio frequencies
don’t. All they can do is generate heat. The benefit of this thing is that with
that power level, you’d recover probably close to three times, three to
three-and-a-half times, more than what you recover from photovoltaics. And you
can have it during the day or night.

Is there something you need government to do or to stop
doing at this stage in the development of the technology?

These are the kind of things that, to get started, you need
a big entity like government to put investment in it—in terms of research and
development—because the barrier to entry is pretty large, regarding the amount
of initial investment. Of course, the return eventually is going to be large,
too.

About the technologies related to wireless power transfer,
both terrestrial and space, I think the government needs to be more proactive
in terms of allowing it to flourish and not getting in the way. With everything
new that comes in, there of course needs to be a thoughtful discourse about it.
But if it gets to a point of becoming too much of an impediment to innovation
and progress, then that would not be a good thing.

So I think allowing these technologies to flourish—in terms
of spectral allocations and other things of that sort—would be a good thing to
continue to do.

Are there key, deal-breaking technological challenges that
you still need to solve?

There are. I mean, it is fair to say that not all the
technical challenges have been solved, but the pathway has become more clear
over the last several years in terms of at least how we go about solving them.

Nobody has built a coherent structure of this magnitude anywhere—not even on Earth, let alone in space. So we have this very thin, very flat sheet that transmits the energy. Because of the coherent addition of all these billions and billions of sources—it’s like an army of ants. If you have an army of ants, you want the ants, that are like a mile apart, to be synchronized within a few picoseconds (and a picosecond is one-trillionth of a second).

It’s a combination of various advanced technologies that
allows us to get this kind of timing synchronization. But those are the kind of
challenges that we’re trying to overcome and solve when you go to this scale.
And it is something that has emerged because we’ve solved the other problems.
Now we are at the point to say, “Okay, well, now we are scaling it up. How do
we do these things?” And we need to solve these problems.

How long until space-based solar arrives? Are we
talking the 2030s? The 2040s?

I’m more on the optimistic side, I guess. I think probably by the end of the 2020s, you will have some demonstration, some power transfer demo. We are going to have to show it soon. We are going to have some technology demonstrations.

But if you want to have a substantial amount of power transferred, probably before the end of this decade. It would probably not provide a whole lot of our power at that point. That takes another decade or two to get to that point—if this pathway turns out to be the right pathway to go down.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Ali Hajimiri is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, as well as Co-Director of the Space-Based Solar Power Project at Caltech.

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