Government’s new net zero plan might be its most idiotic yet
JUNE 14, 2023
By Paul Homewood
I don’t know whether Grant Shapps ever took out a subscription to Look and Learn when he was young, but circumstantial evidence would suggest that he might well have done. It was in the long-defunct children’s magazine, I have a vague recollection, that I first read about the idea of beaming solar-generated power down from space. Shapps is now so taken with the idea that he has just approved a £4.3 million grant to UK universities to help develop it. A quarter of Britain’s energy, he claims, could one day be obtained in this way.
I don’t begrudge the technologists their public money. It is a perfectly proper role of government to fund the development of science and promising technologies which might otherwise struggle to obtain private funding in their early years. And who knows, maybe it will one day turn out to be a practical means of generating energy. Up in space, of course, it is always sunny – and the sunlight is much stronger, having not had to travel through the Earth’s atmosphere.
But a quarter of the UK’s energy, and in time to help Britain reach its 2050 net zero target? Dream on. There is a reason that the exploitation of solar energy from space has remained a pipe dream for the past 50 years. It is fantastically difficult. First, you have to design solar panels which are light enough to launch into space and will continue to generate massive amounts of power without maintenance for many years – not just generating enough electricity to power a few instruments for a few months, as a solar panel on a space probe flung into outer space might do. But the far bigger issue is, how do you then transmit the power down to Earth so that it can be used? The Californian Institute of Technology says it has succeeded in beaming a small amount of energy wirelessly from a satellite to Earth. But there is a long, long way to go between that and commercial operation.
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