SRC-076

RAF036/2425: Feasibility of Small-Scale Space Based Solar Power Systems for Early Market Adoption - Final report

Commissioned by UK government (RAF competition). Who paid for a study is recorded because it bears on how its conclusions should be read, not because it makes them wrong.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-0018 The most recent UK government report calls 230 watts per square metre a limit to be reached because it lowers cost, and cites an earlier report by the same consultancy as the reason for using it.
• CLM-0019 The report sets out Space Solar's plan: a small in-orbit test, then 31 megawatts in 2030, 150 megawatts in 2033, and 650 megawatts in geostationary orbit in 2036.
• CLM-0152 Two UK industry planning documents, from 2022 and 2025, each state a beam-intensity design figure in the 230-245 watts-per-square-metre range, but neither traces that number back to any official safety or interference standard: the 2022 report gives no source for its figure, and the 2025 report, for a system planned to launch in 2033, cites only an earlier internal Frazer-Nash report.
• CLM-0213 The study assumes that connecting a ground receiving site to the electricity grid costs about GBP 150,000 for every megawatt of power the site handles.
• CLM-0214 Six different solar-power-satellite designs each claim that turning the electricity collected on the ground into grid-ready power is 90 to 99% efficient, but nobody has independently checked these numbers.
• CLM-0215 Any UK ground receiving station that wants to connect to the electricity grid must be able to supply or absorb a type of power called reactive power, under an existing UK grid rule.
• CLM-0216 The UK's fast-response grid support services need a generator to react within seconds, at any moment over a 4-hour period. A ground receiving station on its own could not promise that, so it would need its own battery to offer this kind of service.
• CLM-0503 Under the international radio rules as revised at the 2023 world radio conference, there is no radio-frequency allocation for beaming power from space to Earth at either of the two frequencies CASSIOPeiA-type designs use. The international studies that might lead to one are due to report to a conference in 2031, a year after the first working system that a 2025 UK report forecasts for 2030, and before its 2033 and 2036 steps; the report says its dates are estimates.
• CLM-0517 Every date in the plan -- the ground demo (2026), the demo mission (2027-28), 2030, 2033 and 2036 -- is a hope, not a booking, and the report that states them says so itself.
• CLM-1172 A 2025 UK government study tried two places for the receiving station, Aberdeen and southern England near London. Southern England came out better, because the grid there can take the power almost all the time while Aberdeen's connections would lose a quarter of it.
• CLM-1200 A 2025 UK study says Virtus Solis counts the power its receiving site catches in a way the other designs do not: on their common method, a receiver that collects only the central spot of the beam can catch at most about 84 per cent of it.
• CLM-1429 A search on 13 October 2026 found no published model of Britain's power system that is free to decide how much space solar power to build. One British government study valued small space solar plants in a model by scaling down a much larger assumed plant; the only free-choice model found covers the whole of Europe.
• CLM-1474 One UK study designs small power satellites that beam to receivers in Scotland, Canada and Japan, switching between them as they move along their orbit. Each satellite beams to one receiver at a time, and the UK receiver comes first when both are in view.

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