this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Solar panels in space could cut Europe's renewable energy needs by 80% (www.kcl.ac.uk)
submitted 3 days ago by Pro@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36081990

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[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They’re talking about instability in the electrical grid. If we could just snap our fingers and have instant fusion power tomorrow we still couldn’t actually use it because the demand of electricity wouldn’t keep up with the supply.

I’m not sure I understand. Our problem isn’t that we have too much electricity, it’s that the demand for electricity exceeds the production from renewable sources and forces us to rely on burning fossil fuels.

If we replaced all of the coal and gas generation with fusion it would be an immediate improvement. The energy output of controlled fusion can be adjusted in real-time to match the grid needs, exactly like fossil fuels generation.

One of the points of space based solar was that you don’t need batteries.

Terrestrial solar needs energy storage technology because the sun doesn’t shine at night. That’s not true for space based solar, it is always in the sun so the power output is reliable and controllable.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Space-based solar would generate orders of magnitude more power than we actually have a use for.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

It would generate as much or as little power as we design it to. As little as a single solar panel or a multi-gigawatt array.

Even in operation it wouldn’t overproduce electricity. We have people, grid managers, who’s entire job is to coordinate all of the generation sources on the grid so that they adjust their output in order to match demand and maintain grid stability.

Our generation capacity is always higher than normal demand, but all generation methods have the ability to control their output.