“A startup called Overview Energy has completed a major engineering milestone for space-based solar power, successfully beaming energy from a moving aircraft to a ground receiver. The company plans to use the same method and similar hardware to transmit power from satellites in orbit,” reports The Doomslayer.
Space News notes that “Space-based solar power offers the potential of providing vast amounts of power without the limitations of terrestrial solar power, which is unavailable at night or in cloudy conditions, and without the environmental impacts of many other energy sources.” This month, Overview Energy demonstrated a “key technology for its plans to transmit power from space to the Earth.” The company
successfully tested a system that transmitted power using a near-infrared laser from an aircraft flying at an altitude of 5,000 meters to a receiver on the ground. The test involved transmitting “multiple thousands of watts” of power from the aircraft to a receiver on the ground, where it was converted into electricity…Overview Energy is one of the latest efforts to realize a decades-old vision of generating electricity by collecting solar power in space and transmitting it to Earth.
In other news, “Researchers at CERN have developed a new technique that can produce over 15 thousand antihydrogen atoms in just a few hours, a major improvement over earlier methods, which typically generated a few thousand atoms over an entire day. The new method could make antimatter experiments much faster and allow researchers to collect higher-quality data.”
A record number of solar panels are being imported by Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria. That is helping its citizens cope with the country’s notoriously unreliable power grid. Mini-grids made up of solar panels and batteries are being used to power some localities.
African countries often have unreliable power grids, and state-run electric utilities there are prone to blackouts and power outages. Citizens in countries like Niger, Nigeria, and Sudan are now taking matters into their own hands by buying solar panels to power their TVs, light bulbs, and household appliances.
