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.
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