First, you have to design solar panels which are light enough to launch into space and will continue to generate massive amounts of power without maintenance for many years – not just generating enough electricity to power a few instruments for a few months, as a solar panel on a space probe flung into outer space might do. There is a reason that the exploitation of solar energy from space has remained a pipe dream for the past 50 years. Up in space, of course, it is always sunny – and the sunlight is much stronger, having not had to travel through the Earth’s atmosphere.īut a quarter of the UK’s energy, and in time to help Britain reach its 2050 net zero target? Dream on. And who knows, maybe it will one day turn out to be a practical means of generating energy. It is a perfectly proper role of government to fund the development of science and promising technologies which might otherwise struggle to obtain private funding in their early years. I don’t begrudge the technologists their public money. A quarter of Britain’s energy, he claims, could one day be obtained in this way. Shapps is now so taken with the idea that he has just approved a £4.3 million grant to UK universities to help develop it. It was in the long-defunct children’s magazine, I have a vague recollection, that I first read about the idea of beaming solar-generated power down from space. I don’t know whether Grant Shapps ever took out a subscription to Look and Learn when he was young, but circumstantial evidence would suggest that he might well have done.
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