Company - Virtus Solis
Product/Service
- Classification
- Space Utilities
- Category
- Space Solar Power
Power Beaming
Resources - Energy
- Fields
- Space Solar Power
Wireless Power Transfer
- Status
- Development
- First launch
- 2027
Was awarded $200,000 for the NASA Centennial Challenge: Watts on the Moon Phase 2. This challenge describes delivering energy across 3km from a variable source and delivering to a load at the other end - which we solved with our core wireless power transfer technology and a novel energy storage system. Won $200,000 as one of the 7 winning teams of Phase 2, Level 1 of NASA's Watts on the Moon Challenge.
Access to to low-cost energy is the greatest lever for universal prosperity. We believe the primary energy market, which is 85% powered by fossil fuels has no equitable path to sustainability with current technology. The intermittency and non-dispatchable nature of wind and terrestrial solar are not solvable with known battery energy storage at any cost. Space-based solar avoids the need for storage by beaming energy from sun-lit space through weather and night to anywhere on the planet.
Our solution is simultaneously scalable, low-cost, safe and clean. We can enable large scale desalination, recycling and chemical synthesis, as well as urban vertical farming as examples..
How our Space-Based Solar Power System Works:
- Solar power gathered in space by small satellites with high efficiency solar panels.
- Satellites are grouped into massive arrays--100,000 satellites for 100MW--allowing for a highly scalable energy platform.
- Satellites are in sunlight all of the time with long dwell time over the northern/southern hemisphere due to orbital characteristics.
- Solar energy is converted to microwaves to beam energy to ground - rectennas gather microwave energy and convert to electricity.
- Energy can then be sold into the power grid or supply high demand users with energy directly.
The first fractional space based solar power system Proof of Concept demonstration, 2023-03-21
- One power satellite of 1.92m aperture - 6,400 transmitting antenna elements.
- One receiving antenna (rectenna) of 1.32m x 1.62m aperture - 1,944 receiving antenna elements.
- Significant fraction of orbit to ground distance wireless power transfer at 10GHz frequency.
- Farfield distance = 2*A^2/γ , A = aperture (m), γ = Wavelength (m) which is 0.03m for 10Ghz.
- Orbital distance 35,000,000m = 2*A^2/0.03, or 724m aperture for an orbital array.
- 2*1.92^2/0.03 = 245m farfield distance, therefore 100m is 41% of equivalent to orbital distance.
- Safe transfer of received Direct Current power.
- Limited by allowable peak microwave intensities to 20% of sunlight.
- The demonstration is destined for medium-Earth orbit, where Earth’s atmosphere will not interfere with “continuous solar power generation,” according to the news release.
- The 2027 mission is designed to showcase critical power-generation technologies including in-space assembly of solar panels and transmission of more than one kilowatt to Earth. The news release calls the 2027 mission “a precursor to large-scale commercial megawatt-class solar installations in space by 2030.”
- “The success of the pilot plant will validate the practicality of [space-based solar power] as a reliable and perpetual energy source,” Bucknell said in a statement.
- And nuclear power, Bucknell said, is much more expensive. "The cost of nuclear power is between $150 and $200 per megawatt hour," said Bucknell. "We think that our system could get down to around $30 per megawatt hour once at scale."
- Virtus Solis wants to build giant photovoltaic arrays up to 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across that would be assembled in orbit by robots from 5.3-foot (1.6 meters) wide modules. Hundreds of such modules would be delivered by a single Starship into the Molniya orbit, a highly elliptical orbit with the closest point about 500 miles (800 km) above Earth and the farthest at 22,000 miles (35,000 km).
- A satellite in this orbit takes 12 hours to complete one lap around the planet, but the nature of this orbit is such that the spacecraft stays for more than 11 hours in the most distant region from where it can view nearly an entire hemisphere.
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