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A Japanese company is proposing building a massive ring of solar panels around the Moon and using it to power Earth. Like literally turning the Moon into a power station.
It sounds like something pulled from a sci-fi pitch deck. But it’s being framed as a serious long-term solution to the question of powering the planet without fossil fuels. Let’s unpack the idea.
The concept is built around one key advantage: the Moon doesn’t have weather. There are no clouds blocking sunlight. There are no storms and no night cycle in the same way we experience on Earth.
So, instead of building solar farms that depend on conditions here, Shimizu Corporation wants to place them where sunlight is far more consistent.
The plan is to stretch solar panels across the Moon’s 11,000 km equator, forming a continuous energy-generating ring.
But collecting power on the Moon is only half the story. The real trick lies in sending it back to earth. The proposal involves converting solar energy into microwave or laser signals on the Moon, then transmitting those beams to receiving stations on Earth, known as rectennas.
Those stations would convert the signal back into electricity and feed it into the grid.
The concept traces back to Japan’s push for safer energy after the Fukushima disaster.
Instead of relying on traditional power sources, the efforts shifted toward solutions that are cleaner, more stable, and less vulnerable to environmental risks.
The real “secret sauce” is the transmission. Shimizu Corporation doesn’t plan on running a very long extension cord, but they want to beam the power down using microwaves and lasers.
It sounds like a Bond villain’s weapon, but here, the target is a “rectenna”—a receiving station on Earth that turns those beams back into the juice that charges your iPhone.
This isn’t something to be assembled on Earth and launched all at once. The plan leans heavily on in-space manufacturing.
Lunar materials like sand would be processed into construction components. Robots would handle most of the assembly, operating remotely from Earth.
At the end of all the work lies a massive payoff. At full scale, the system could generate up to 13,000 terawatts of power continuously. That’s more than enough to cover global electricity demand.
However, the cost is staggering, from the logistics to the risks like damage from space debris or maintaining precise energy transmission. Reliability also has to hold under real-world conditions.
As Shimizu Corporation put it, it is a long-term vision that depends on future breakthroughs.
Source: The Jerusalem Post
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