One of the more ambitious suggestions for helping solve our energy crisis and getting to Net Zero is SBSP or Space Based Solar Power. It involves building a huge solar panel in space to collect the sun’s power and beaming it back to earth using radio waves, then collected in an even larger rectenna “net” below.

The tech would provide energy, day and night, throughout the year, unaffected by weather, and feed 2 gigawatts of power into the grid, the equivalent of a nuclear power station.

The idea was discussed in a session at the FT’s Investing in Space conference this week. An independent study for the UK government has estimated the cost would be a reasonable ￡16bn, but it would take until 2040 to get it properly up and running, as technologies were developed for the modular construction of the panels in space by robots.