Soaring demand for electricity is leading some companies to not only think out of the box for a solution, but out of this world, too.
Researchers are looking to supersize the production of wind and solar power. Several startups and small companies have an eye on revolutionizing the sector, such as building the largest aircraft in the world to transport much larger wind turbines and constructing a solar array in space to beam electricity down to Earth.
The ideas seem like moonshots, but there’s a possibility of them both taking off off within the next five years.
Jumbo jet
One of the challenges for developers of wind farms is the logistics of moving the lengthy turbine blades to rural areas by truck or rail. For Colorado-based Radia, the solution is to develop a specialty jumbo aircraft with the ability to carry a single turbine blade that could be about 50 per cent longer than those currently used at wind farms.
For the last eight years, Radia has worked to design and develop the WindRunner aircraft, which would be about 40 per cent longer than a Boeing 747 jet, said founder Mark Lundstrom.
“In the aircraft, there’s no new technology. We’ve designed the aircraft around the things that are already flying,” he said, in an interview with CBC News in Houston during the CERAWeek energy conference last week.
Radia is developing its massive WindRunner aircraft to transport large wind turbine blades
Besides the size of the aircraft, the planes also need the ability to land on gravel runways constructed in rural locations where the wind farms will be built.
Typically, turbine blades installed on land are about 70 metres in length, however those deployed offshore measure over 100 metres long. Radia’s aircraft would be able to transport the longer blades to new wind farms developed on land.
“With the bigger turbines, they operate at a much lower wind speed. And so that enables you to double or triple the acreage in the world where wind is economically viable,” said Lundstrom.
“You’re going to double the capacity of that turbine, you’re going to reduce the cost of the electrons by about a third and you’re also going to increase the utilization of the turbine by about 20 per cent.”
Radia is considered a unicorn startup as it’s valued at more than $1 billion US, according to PitchBook. Employees and advisers include executives at Boeing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and renewable energy companies.
Radia has announced several partnerships with various aerospace companies to develop different aspects of the aircraft such as the fuselage and wing. Lundstrom hopes to begin the manufacturing phase later this year and said Radia has begun accepting orders for delivery of cargo.
North American electricity consumption is soaring, in part due to population growth, the electrification of industry and the rise of data centres.
Solar satellite
While Radia aims for takeoff by the end of this decade, Space Solar has a similar timeline for blast-off.
The U.K.-based firm is engineering how to build a solar array in orbit (using robots for assembly, no less). In this wireless age, the electricity would be beamed via high-frequency radio waves to communities around the globe.
“The sun always shines in space,” said co-CEO Sam Adlen in an interview in Houston at CERAWeek.
The whole premise seems far-fetched and out-of-this-world, but if successful, the result could be abundant, reliable, low-carbon energy and available to the most remote communities in the world.
It’s the ultimate clean energy, described Adlen.
“Being able to transmit energy from space can be really important for the future,” he said. “It’s not science fiction. All of the physics is completely understood.”
The British company aims to have a commercial-scale solar power plant in space by 2030.
The concept has been around for decades, including a 1970s NASA technical feasibility study about space-based solar power.
The idea has only now become economically possible as the cost of launching equipment into space has fallen dramatically over the past decade, said Adlen.
Last year, Space Solar signed a deal with Iceland’s Reykjavik Energy to build the world’s first operational space solar power plant and deliver 30 megawatts of electricity. Space Solar has also partnered with Transition Labs, an Iceland-based private-sector organization focused on supporting climate technologies.
In 2023, the U.K. government announced £4.3 million in funding for universities and tech companies to develop space-based solar power.
The Current19:54What will the U.S. push for ‘energy dominance’ mean for Canada?
Donald Trump’s administration wants to create a new era of “energy dominance” in the U.S., by ramping up energy production to bring cheap power to more Americans. What will this mean for Canada’s oil and gas sector? CBC business reporter Kyle Bakx went to CERAWeek, the “Super Bowl” of energy conferences, to find out what the industry is thinking.
Several other startups and university research teams are also pursuing solar-based power plants using different techniques.
Both Radia and Space Solar still have challenges ahead to demonstrate their technology functions as promised at the right price, while also receiving all the necessary approvals from regulators.
These projects also will have to overcome the issue of community opposition
Larger blades installed to taller towers makes economic sense, but could also be visible to more people.
The biggest question mark is the social license and social acceptability,” said Jesse Jenkins, a professor at Princeton University who did a study for Radia as a consultant, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Power plants in space using radio waves, may face similar pushback from communities.
“We’ve seen how 5G can cause problems, so actually that needs to be managed very carefully,” said Adlen, referring to the perception some have that the technology is dangerous, though there is no evidence of this.
Over the past decades, the solar and wind industries have expanded throughout North America as costs have fallen and the technology becomes more efficient with every passing year.
Now, if successful, these firms and other companies hope to reimagine wind and solar power with their space-age and high-flying ideas over the years to come.
