Chongqing city in southwestern China will soon have the nation’s first experimental facility to test a revolutionary technology allowing China to send, and receive, a powerful energy beam from space in about a decade, according to scientists involved in the project, reported the South China Morning Post.
Harvesting energy from the sun and beaming it to Earth using huge infrastructure in orbit has been regarded as science fiction, but according to a plan by the Chinese government, the nation will put a 1 megawatt solar energy station in space by 2030.
And by 2049, when the People’s Republic of China celebrates its 100th anniversary, the total power capacity of the plant or plants would increase to 1 gigawatt, the equivalent of the current largest nuclear power reactor.