SBSP in support of Net Zero
Europe aims to be climate-neutral by 2050 – an economy with ‘Net Zero’ greenhouse gas emissions. It will take a major shift in our continent’s power sector towards renewable power sources to make this ambition feasible.
The International Energy Agency forecasts that renewables will make up nearly 90% of electricity generation by 2050, propelled largely by solar and wind power. But that will open up a supply gap, because these sources are intermittent by nature. Storage solutions such as batteries can help close this gap to some extent but are not a complete solution to provide a fully reliable and stable grid. The need will still be there for ‘baseload’ clean energy sources – that are available on a continuous, uninterrupted basis.
Space Based Solar Power is a promising solution to closing this gap. Power beamed down from space would be clean, scalable, affordable and available anywhere in the world.
With global energy budgets measured in the trillions of euros, the cost of a first gigawatt-scale solar power satellite has been estimated at approximately €20 billion, equivalent to the construction of a new nuclear power plant. Later duplicated units would benefit from mass-production and economies of scale, thereby reducing build costs substantially, resulting in baseload power generation more than half as cheaply as nuclear, around the same unit price as that from large-scale terrestrial solar plants.
