Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has agreed to buy power from a startup company that wants to tap the strong, unfiltered sunlight found in space to solve the growing demand for clean energy. By 2016, the energy powering some California homes may come from solar panels orbiting the planet.

Under the plan, which PG&E hopes to have approved by the end of October, the utility would hire Solaren of Manhattan Beach to oversee the project, which is expected to deliver 200 megawatts of power to California by as early as 2016. One megawatt of electricity generally is enough to power 750 to 1,000 homes.

“We’re convinced it’s a very serious possibility that they can make this work,” said PG&E spokesman Jonathan Marshall. “It’s staggering how much power is potentially available in space. And I say ‘potentially’ because a lot remains unknown about the cost and other details.”

The idea would be to have satellites in stationary or so-called geosynchronous orbits over the Earth use solar cells to convert the sun’s energy to electricity. The satellite then would transmit that power as radio frequency energy to antennas in Fresno County, which would convert the energy to electricity for the state’s power grid.

The solar energy available in space is up to ten times greater than on Earth as there’s no atmospheric or cloud interference to contend with, no real night and no seasons. This means that if solar power could somehow be harvested from space, it could be a baseload resource instead of an intermittent source of power.

The idea of space-based solar energy has been discussed for decades on Usenet. It appeared in Newsgroups as far back as 1980 and has since received serious study by NASA and the Pentagon. Now, Solaren CEO Gary Spirnak says the technology is ready for prime time. “While a system of this scale and exact configuration has not been built, the underlying technology is very mature and is based on current communications satellite technology.”

You can find out more about this news story as well as other topics regarding solar, green energy and astronomy on newsgroups, such as:

sci.energy
alt.energy.renewable
sci.energy.hydrogen
alt.energy.homepower
alt.energy
clari.biz.industry.energy
alt.solar.thermal
alt.astronomy.solar
alt.solar