Stardate: April 10, 2009. The world began looking a bit different on that day. In the future, some might say that was the day things began looking up.
From when they are small, American children are taught to believe the sky's the limit, that imagination is boundless, that great inventors try and fail repeatedly until they break through with their dreams to change the world.
Thus, April 10, 2009: That's the date when imagination docked with the Earthbound economics model in our backyard. The California Public Utilities Commission received a request on that day from the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to buy renewable energy from Solaren, a Manhattan Beach company whose secretive Web site offers little beyond this teaser : "Energy for Tomorrow with the Technology of Today."
Solaren's fuel is sunlight. Its "plant" is proposed for space.
What has been deemed fantasy and science fiction for decades is now the basis of a real request for what is described in the application as a real technology ready to be tried.
"Space Solar Power (SSP) uses satellites in geosynchronous orbit to collect solar energy, which is then transmitted to the ground for conversion into electricity," PG&E's application says. "More specifically SSP satellites use solar cells to convert the sun's energy to electricity in space."
A generator device would convert the electricity into radio frequency waves and transmit them to a receiver on the ground in Fresno County, which then would convert the energy to electricity and send it into the local power grid.
PG&E wants permission to buy up to 200 megawatts of power from Solaren if the company succeeds in launching the satellites. The utility says the engineering challenge isn't the energy conversion, it's the need to engineer and build those satellites.
Who can say whether those technical challenges can be overcome, and at what cost? For now, it's enough to celebrate the progress toward a day when clean energy is no longer an out-of-this-world idea but a reality, thanks to boundless imagination.
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