Overview

• The King’s College London study integrates a NASA space-solar concept into a 33‑country grid model and reports potential to replace up to 80% of land‑based wind and solar.
• The heliostat design modeled could deliver power roughly 99% of the year, cutting large‑scale battery needs by more than two‑thirds and lowering total system costs by 7%–15% (about €35.9 billion annually).
• A simpler planar array design operates about 60% of the time and is less economical, yet the authors recommend deploying it first to demonstrate SBSP while accelerating R&D on higher‑continuity heliostats.
• To be cost‑effective by 2050, annual costs must fall to roughly 14× (heliostat) and 9× (planar) those of terrestrial solar, with current estimates still 1–2 orders of magnitude above those break‑even levels.
• The modeling excludes space‑specific risks such as orbital debris, congestion and transmission interruptions, and the authors say practical, competitive deployment is unlikely before about 2050 without major advances and coordinated policy efforts.