China reveals military capabilities in new space solar power plant design

China is one of the world’s leading countries developing space-based solar power.

Photo: Shutterstock A senior Chinese scientist has outlined the potential military applications of space-based solar power technology, offering a rare glimpse into how energy beamed from orbit could also support surveillance and electronic warfare.

Duan Baoyan, a leading architect of China’s “Zhuri” space solar power initiative, wrote in a paper published in Scientia Sinica Informationis last month, that his team had revamped the design of the giant orbital infrastructure.

In addition to energy transmission, the new system was required to support a wide range of tasks “such as communication, navigation, reconnaissance, interference and remote control”, he said.

Duan, a professor of electromechanical engineering at Xidian University in Xian and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, also stressed the need for extremely narrow, precisely steerable microwave beams to deliver energy from space to the ground over long distances.

While designed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of wireless power transmission, these capabilities could, in principle, enable targeted signal transmission, including potential applications such as jamming or securing military communications.

China is one of the world’s leading countries developing space-based solar power.

Unlike solar panels on the ground, which are limited by weather, seasons and the day-night cycle, space-based systems can collect sunlight almost continuously.

The energy is converted into electricity in orbit, transmitted as a microwave beam to the ground, and then converted back into power by receiving antennas on Earth.

More than a decade ago, Duan and his colleagues proposed the so-called “OMEGA” design as one of China’s main approaches to building such a system.

In 2022, the team completed a 75-metre (265-feet) ground-based facility to test the full process, from tracking the sun and concentrating light to transmitting energy wirelessly and receiving it at a distance.

In the latest paper, Duan focused on making the OMEGA – or Orbit M-shaped Exploration and Gigawatt Application – design – now part of the broader “Zhuri”, or “sun-chasing”, initiative – more practical, proposing a shift from a single large structure to a modular system made up of many smaller units working together.

Instead of relying on one massive power station, the distributed design would group multiple solar-collecting units into m

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