While Florida's Public Service Commission attempts to regroup its commissioners and seems to have no cohesive vision for renewable energy and many in our Florida legislature want to drill baby drill, California's PSC just approved a utility contract for the nation's first space-based solar power plant.
According to a New York Times article, a 200-megawatt orbiting solar farm would convert solar energy collected in space into radio frequency waves, which would be beamed to a ground station near Fresno, Calif. The radio waves would then be transformed back into electricity and fed into the power grid. 
The patented process involves a floating Mylar mirror that would collect sunlight and concentrate it onto a smaller mirror that would then focus the sun's rays onto photovoltaic modules.
This, of course, opens up all kinds of conversations about who owns the rights to sunshine and the fact that the concept would cost much more than land-based solar collectors. It would, conceivably, address the inefficiencies of present-day collectors. It seems that all the technology has yet to be worked out, but the president of the California Public Utilities Commission was quoted as saying that “it’s hard to argue with the audacity of the project.”
12.07.2009
WHILE FLORIDA DITHERS, CALIFORNIA APPROVES SOLAR IN SPACE
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