Meta inks deal for solar power at night, beamed from space

The race to safe electrical energy for AI fashions has reached new heights: Meta has signed an settlement with the startup Overview Power that would see a thousand satellites beam infrared gentle to photo voltaic farms that energy knowledge facilities at evening.

In 2024, Meta’s knowledge facilities used greater than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electrical energy—roughly sufficient to energy greater than 1.7 million American properties for a 12 months—and its want for compute energy is simply rising. The corporate has dedicated to constructing 30 gigawatts of renewable energy sources, with a concentrate on industrial-scale solar energy crops.

Usually, knowledge facilities turning to solar energy should both spend money on battery storage or depend on different technology sources to function at evening.

Overview, a four-year-old, Ashburn, Virginia, outfit that emerged from stealth in December, has a distinct answer: The corporate is growing spacecraft that acquire plentiful solar energy in area. It then plans to transform that vitality to near-infrared gentle and beam it at sufficiently giant photo voltaic farms—on the order of a whole lot of megawatts—which may convert that gentle to electrical energy.

Through the use of a large, infrared beam to energy current terrestrial photo voltaic infrastructure, Overview thinks it might sidestep the technological challenges and security and regulatory points that bedevil plans to transmit energy to Earth by means of high-power lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte says you’ll be capable to stare proper into his satellite tv for pc’s beam with no unwell results.

The know-how would enhance the return on funding from constructing photo voltaic farms and scale back reliance on fossil fuels — if it may be deployed at scale.

Overview says it has already demonstrated energy transmission to the bottom from an plane, and is planning to launch a satellite tv for pc to low Earth orbit in January 2028 to carry out its first energy transmission from area.

In at this time’s announcement, Meta mentioned it signed the primary capability reservation settlement with Overview to obtain as much as 1 gigawatt of energy from the corporate’s spacecraft, though it’s not clear if any cash modified palms. Overview developed a brand new metric for this contract, megawatt photons, which is the quantity of sunshine required to generate a megawatt of electrical energy.

Berte expects to start launching the satellites that might fulfill that dedication in 2030, with a aim of flying 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, a excessive orbit through which every satellite tv for pc stays mounted above the identical level on Earth. He expects every of the corporate’s spacecraft to supply energy from area for greater than 10 years.

As soon as in area, Berte says the fleet of spacecraft will be capable to cowl a couple of third of the planet, with an preliminary deployment that can attain from the West Coast of the US throughout to Western Europe. Because the Earth rotates beneath and buyer photo voltaic farms enter night and evening, Overview’s spacecraft ought to increase their electrical technology with further gentle from area.

Berte sees alternative in combining each technology and transmission, with the pliability to ship energy to photo voltaic farms wherever and each time it’s most precious.

“There’s an enormous distinction between being in anybody vitality market, and being in the entire vitality markets,” Berte advised Trendster.