Plenty of commentary on one particular storage story filling up the blogosphere today, and so we felt no need to stick our oar in–at least not yet. Instead, here’s a news story that made me sit up and take notice. According to GigaOm greentech blog Earth2Tech, California’s megautility PG&E is in the midst of a project to develop solar power in space.
As reporter Katie Fehrenbacher explains, the project is in coordination with a company called Solaren, which–you guessed it–develops solar power in space. The site for this company is essentially a frontpage with no information, beyond some primitive Flash that reads “Energy for Tomorrow with the Technology of Today.” Not exactly reassuring.
According to Fehrenbacher, the plan is to convert the solar energy to radio frequency energy, which can then be beamed down to earth and used as electricity.
A hoax? Or a real potential breakthrough in green energy? Hard to say. There’s a lot of commentary on GigaOm that tends to imply it could be both or neither, and which certainly doesn’t settle the question. Here’s one obvious issue: exactly how much fossil fuel does it take to blast these panels up there?
Image: PG&E Blog
