Solar power has the disadvantage that there’s no Sun at night. Satellite startup Reflect Orbital wants to change that, but at what cost?
Here on Earth, humanity’s global energy needs only seem to increase over time. A combination of increasing populations, the widespread development of heating and cooling, a reliance on modern electronics, and the introduction of new energy-intensive technologies (such as the blockchain, smart technology, and artificial intelligence) are among the factors driving our rising energy needs. Sure, we can always build more power plants, but what about the simple solution of increasing the efficiency and production of already-existing plants, particularly the ones that only see part-time usage: wind and solar. Wind power doesn’t work when the air is still, and solar doesn’t work during the night.
Or can it?
That’s something that the US-based startup, Reflect Orbital, wants to change. The idea is to produce, as they put it, “sunlight on demand” — and light pollution by design — with plans to launch thousands (or possibly hundreds of thousands) of reflective satellites that would use mirrors to beam sunlight, collected in low-Earth orbit, onto the locations of already-existing…
