Like a Cattle Drive... Except in Space... and with Photons Instead of Cows

Sorry about the silly title. Space-based solar energy is obviously more complicated than herding cattle, although I don't doubt that cattle can be pretty tricky to rustle up. Anyway, the idea of launching a satellite into orbit to collect energy has been around for quite a few years, but it looks like someone is finally funding the idea.

The price tag, though, is a doozy: $21 billion. The project is being funded by 16 Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., and IHI Corp, but will be headed up by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The station is slated to use 4 square kilometers of solar panels to generate 1 gigawatt of power, enough to power 294,000 homes, according to this report from Bloomberg. Unfortunately, there are an estimated 47 million households in Japan, according to the CIA's World Factbook.

A test satellite is slated to go into orbit in 2015, which will gather solar power and beam it back to earth on a much smaller scale. The real deal, however, wouldn't be functional until 2030. It's a lot of time to wait and a lot of money to invest, but if the lifespan is sufficient, the long-term benefits may outweigh these initial costs.

According to this article by Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur and CEO of Abaca, "If we are to have any hope of avoiding a climate crisis, we have to be installing about 1 GW of new clean power somewhere in the world every single day for the next 30 years."

So, perhaps this step is too small, but it's hard to be sure. Doing nothing, though, will not help, so I say let's move forward with this and anything else we can.