Forget wind power or conventional solar power, the world’s energy needs could be met 100 billion times over using a satellite to harness the solar wind and beam the energy to Earth – though focussing the beam could be tricky.

The concept for the so-called Dyson-Harrop satellite begins with a long metal wire loop pointed at the sun. This wire is charged to generate a cylindrical magnetic field that snags the electrons that make up half the solar wind. These electrons get funnelled into a metal spherical receiver to produce a current, which generates the wire’s magnetic field – making the system self-sustaining.

Any current not needed for the magnetic field powers an infrared laser trained on satellite dishes back on Earth, designed to collect the energy. Air is transparent to infrared so Earth’s atmosphere won’t suck up energy from the beam before it reaches the ground.

Back on the satellite, the current has been drained of its electrical energy by the laser – the electrons fall onto a ring-shaped sail, where incoming sunlight can re-energise them enough to keep the satellite in orbit around the sun.


A relatively small Dyson-Harrop satellite using a 1-centimetre-wide copper wire 300 metres long, a receiver 2 metres wide and a sail 10 metres in diameter, sitting at roughly the same distance from the sun as the Earth, could generate 1.7 megawatts of power – enough for about 1000 family homes in the US.

A satellite with the same-sized receiver at the same distance from the sun but with a 1-kilometre-long wire and a sail 8400 kilometres wide could generate roughly 1 billion billion gigawatts (1027 watts) of power, “which is actually 100 billion times the power humanity currently requires”, says researcher Brooks Harrop, a physicist at Washington State University in Pullman who designed the satellite.

Since the satellites are made up mostly of copper, they would be relatively easy to construct. “This satellite is actually something that we can build, using modern technology and delivery methods,” Harrop says.

Satellites laden with solar panels that can beam their energy down 24 hours a day have been discussed for decades. California agreed last December to a deal involving the sale of space-based solar power. Solar panels cost more per pound than the copper making up the Dyson-Harrop satellites, so according to Harrop, “the cost of a solar wind power satellite project should be lower than a comparative solar panel project”.

So far so good, but there is one major drawback. To draw significant amounts of power Dyson-Harrop satellites rely on the constant solar wind found high above the ecliptic – the plane defined by the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Consequently, the satellite would lie tens of millions of kilometres from the Earth. Over those distances, even a sharp laser beam would spread to thousands of kilometres wide by the time it reached Earth.

“Two megawatts spread across areas that large are meaningless, less than moonlight,” says John Mankins, president of consultancy firm Artemis Innovation which specialises in space solar power. To beam power from a Dyson-Harrop satellite to Earth, one “would require stupendously huge optics, such as a virtually perfect lens between maybe 10 to 100 kilometres across,” he says.

He also points out that the wire could burn out due to the huge current coursing through it, although he has not performed the calculations to gauge the probability of that occurring. But he does say that a smaller version of this “clever and interesting” satellite could help power some space missions. “I could imagine uses for this idea outside of the plane of the ecliptic, such as helping generate power for something like the Ulysses spacecraft, which went around the poles of the sun.”

Journal reference: International Journal of Astrobiology, DOI: 10.1017/S1473550410000066