PG&E Agrees to Grab Headlines With Space Solar Deal

(MoneyWatch)  Today's hot news story is one that surely inspired cackles of glee at the marketing department for Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that is taking all comers in hopes of meeting a (potential) requirement of 33 percent renewable energy by 2020. I mention marketing and not, say, business development, because the agreement PG&E made is almost certainly destined for failure. But check out a sampling of the headlines it got:

• PG&E Looks To Outer Space For Solar Power (Wall Street Journal)
• Space Based Solar Power A Reality By 2016? (Energy Matters)
• PG&E buying solar power from Solaren sourced from outer space (Bizjournals)

Yes, the venerable idea of orbital solar panels, now 40 years old, has finally broken into the mainstream. The "news" is that PG&E has agreed to buy electricity (probably at standard rates) from such panels if the startup promising to get them launched, Solaren, can get enough panels aloft by 2016 to provide 200 megawatts of power going forward. If they don't, no problem; PG&E doesn't pay anything up front.

You'll get no argument from me about the viability of the technology, by the way. All of it exists. Solar panel designs we have in spades. Microwave beams carrying energy have been beamed through the earth's atmosphere, proving that the power the panels pick up in space could reach a ground station. And of course, we can launch things into space.

While Solaren would have to figure out all the details of their floating solar array, like how the panels are arrayed and how to sync them with the ground station (not to mention how to make a rather massive power station avoid the now copious amounts of space junk floating around), it's the last part, launching, that's the sticking point. We know how to put things into space -- really expensively. It's about ten times more expensive than a company like Solaren would need, and reaching orbit would be the most expensive part of the deal for the company.

We've had a few decades to bring this price down. NASA hasn't done a great job of that; in fact, they just paid about half a billion dollars to get a single 45-foot solar truss to the International Space Station. Startups like SpaceX are slowly changing the equation. But what's the likelihood of it reducing exponentially within seven years?

Luckily, Solaren has the hope of massive amounts of money. Here's the Cleantech Group's description of the grand plan (my bolding):

"Solaren is based in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and is seeking investors for a private stock placement to raise "billions" of dollars for its business plan, said Gary Spirnak, CEO of Solaren to Cleantech Group.

Solaren is in talks with investment trusts in Europe and the United States, with which it hopes to finalize investment agreements by the summer, said Spirnak.
Next would come engineering and design of the solar plant that would orbit in space, catch the sun's rays and send them down to a ground station on Earth, he continued."

Either Solaren has the world's greatest salesman, or they're about to be bitterly disappointed. Otherwise, I can't imagine any investors agreeing, over the course of a couple months, to line up their billions behind a project that hasn't even been designed yet, and almost certainly can't be even remotely economical in the desired timeframe. But hey, at least PG&E got some publicity from it all.