Chinese Solar Panel Plant Orbiting In Space Could End Oil Dependence

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China has announced plans to create a huge solar power station in space that will allow the collection of solar energy which can then be beamed down to Earth. The enormous infrastructure, which includes a one-kilometer long solar panel array , will be launched into the geostationary orbit, around 36,000km above Earth using super-heavy rockets which have the capacity to lift over 150 tons.

This project is similar to Three Gorges Dam located in the middle of the Yangtze River, in central China which is the world's largest hydropower hub, generating 100,000 million kW/h of electricity per year. Long Lehao , the leading scientist of this new project, claims the ambitious space-based solar station 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", confessed Long during a lecture organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in October. " The energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth ", the scientist concluded.

Although great progress has been made in terms of capturing solar energy, there are still some limitations, such as the intermittent presence of clouds or the fact that most of the atmosphere absorbs the radiation before it reaches the ground . That is why scientists have proposed a series of space-based solar energy power technologies (SBSP) that collect and transmit energy from sunlight in space, where it is much more intense than at Earth's surface.

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