Caltech Announces Breakthrough $100 Million Gift to Fund Space-based Solar Power Project
Today, Caltech is announcing that Donald Bren, chairman of Irvine Company and a lifetime member of the Caltech Board of Trustees, donated over $100 million to form the Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP), which is developing technology capable of generating solar power in space and beaming it back to Earth.
The donation was made anonymously in 2013, but
the gift is now being disclosed as SSPP nears a significant milestone: a
test launch of multifunctional technology-demonstrator prototypes that
collect sunlight and convert it to electrical energy, transfer energy
wirelessly in free-space using radio frequency (RF) electrical power,
and deploy ultralight structures that will be used to integrate them.
Donald
Bren first learned about the potential for space-based solar energy
manufacturing in an article in the magazine Popular Science and in 2011,
he approached Caltech’s then-president Jean-Lou Chameau to discuss the
creation of a space-based solar power research project. In 2013, he and
his wife, Brigitte, a Caltech trustee, agreed to make the donation to
fund the project. The first of the donations that now exceed $100
million was made that year through the Donald Bren Foundation, and the
research began.
“Donald Bren has brought the same drive and
discipline that he has demonstrated with master planning communities to
the Space Solar Program,” says Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum.
“He has presented a remarkable technical challenge that promises a
remarkable payoff for humanity: a world powered by uninterruptible
renewable energy.”
Donald Bren is best
known for master planning and master building the all-new City of
Irvine, regularly named one of America’s greenest cities. He has led
Irvine Company’s effort to permanently preserve more than 60 percent
(57,500 acres) of the Irvine Ranch property along the California coast.
“I
have been a student researching the possible applications of
space-based solar energy for many years,” says Donald Bren. “My interest
in supporting the world-class scientists at Caltech is driven by my
belief in harnessing the natural power of the sun for the benefit of
everyone.”
SSPP aims to ultimately produce a
global supply of affordable, renewable, clean energy. A key benefit of
harnessing solar power from space is that it provides access to the sun
to create power all day, every day, free from weather constraints or
darkness of night.
The project’s first
test, which will occur in early 2023, will launch technology prototypes
for the solar power generators and RF wireless power transfer, and
includes a deployable structure measuring roughly 6 feet by 6 feet.
The Brens have no financial stake in the project and will not benefit financially from any technology that is created.
“It
shows the magnitude of the generosity,” says Ali Hajimiri, Caltech’s
Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering and
co-director of SSPP. “They really want to change the world and truly see
this as an opportunity to make a lasting difference for the planet,
while generating a broad range of novel technologies with impact in many
areas such as wireless power, communications, and sensing.”
The
Bren’s gift has allowed researchers to overcome many early hurdles and
funded the hiring of doctoral students to work on the project with a
five-year commitment, notes Sergio Pellegrino, Caltech’s Joyce and Kent
Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Professor of Civil Engineering and
co-director of SSPP. Pellegrino is also a senior research scientist at
JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA.
“It allows us to think ahead,” Pellegrino says. “Without that, it couldn’t get done.”
“Solar
energy is the world’s most abundant energy resource. However, sunlight
is intermittent at the earth’s surface. This ambitious project is a
transformative approach to large-scale solar energy harvesting for the
Earth that overcomes this intermittency and the need for energy storage,
since sunlight shines continuously in space,” says Harry A. Atwater,
who is an SSPP researcher, Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division
of Engineering and Applied Science and the Howard Hughes Professor of
Applied Physics and Materials Science, and director of the Liquid Sunlight Alliance.
