Europe’s Next Energy Frontier Is Above Us
By Jasper Deprez, Founder & CEO at TerraSpark
Space-based solar power sounds like an enormous technological bet. The more interesting question for finance may be whether we can turn it into a sequence of investable ones.
Imagine collecting solar energy in space and transmitting it wirelessly to Earth, wherever it is needed. A factory in Germany. A data centre in Luxembourg. An island thousands of kilometres from the nearest power plant. The idea is called space-based solar power.
Solar panels in orbit collect sunlight and convert it into electricity. That electricity is transformed into radio-frequency waves, transmitted to a receiving station on Earth and converted back into usable electricity. It sounds like science fiction. It isn't.
The concept has been studied for more than fifty years. The physics isn't the mystery. The challenge has always been making the engineering, and economics, work at scale. It was a giant leap with no stairs.
Historically, space-based solar power was imagined at enormous scale: gigawatt-class power stations requiring huge structures in orbit and billions in capital before producing commercially useful electricity. That creates an extraordinary financing problem.
Investors are effectively asked to accept launch, technology, manufacturing, regulatory and market risk simultaneously, with revenues potentially many years away. It wasn't just difficult to engineer. It was difficult to finance.
Today, the equation is changing. Launch is becoming cheaper. Satellites are becoming more industrialised. Robotics, solar cells, electronics and wireless power transmission have advanced significantly.
That allows us to rethink not only how we build space-based solar power, but how we finance it.
At TerraSpark, our thesis is simple: don't start with the final system. Build a staircase. And with every step, make the technology a little more boring.
Making frontier technology boring
“Boring” may sound like a strange ambition for a frontier technology company, but boring is ultimately what infrastructure investors need. They want predictable performance, understood risks, contracted revenues and assets that can be modelled. Our first step doesn't even happen in space.
Wireless power transmission can be developed on Earth, initially where installing
physical cables is expensive, slow or impractical. This allows us to prove efficiency, reliability, safety and economics at relatively small scale while creating commercial value. Then progressively larger parts of the system can move into space.
Each milestone should remove a specific uncertainty: Does the technology work reliably? Can it survive in orbit? Can it scale? Can we deliver useful power? Will customers sign long-term contracts for that power?
The objective is to systematically turn unknowns into knowns. That changes the financing equation.
Early technology risk is suited to venture capital, strategic investment and public R&D funding. As technical risk falls and commercially useful systems emerge, larger pools of growth and infrastructure capital can participate. Once assets demonstrate predictable performance and contracted electricity revenues, debt and project finance become possible.
The progression is therefore not simply: small system → bigger system → utility-scale system.
It is: high-risk technology → proven system → predictable infrastructure → financeable asset.
And with each transition, the cost of capital should fall.
A technology that today sounds almost impossible should eventually become something a financial institution can model in a spreadsheet: expected generation, availability, operating costs, contracted revenues, asset life and return. That is when frontier technology becomes infrastructure.
1. Capture: Solar arrays in orbit collect sunlight 24/7 – no night, no weather, no atmosphere blocking the Sun's energy.
2. Convert: Photovoltaic systems transform sunlight into electrical energy with higher productivity than ground-based systems due to continuous, unobstructed exposure.
3. Transmit: The electrical energy is converted into radio frequency waves (the same spectrum used for WiFi and satellite TV) that safely pass through the atmosphere with negligible loss.
4. Receive: Ground receiving site captures the transmitted power with higher energy density per square metre than traditional solar farms.
5. Distribute: The received energy is converted into electricity and fed directly into the power grid, delivering clean power exactly where it's needed
A new infrastructure asset class
If space-based solar reaches that point, the implications extend far beyond the space industry.
Europe needs enormous quantities of reliable electricity for electrification, industry, AI and data centres. Yet the infrastructure required to deliver that electricity increasingly takes years to build.
Space-based solar introduces a radically different possibility: separating where energy is produced from where it is consumed.
Energy collected in orbit could ultimately be directed toward receiving stations in different locations on Earth. It changes the geography of energy.
If commercially viable, this could create an entirely new infrastructure category requiring long-term power contracts, insurance, project finance, debt markets and institutional capital.
That creates an interesting opportunity for Luxembourg.
Luxembourg's strength in space has never come from its physical size. It has come from combining technology, regulation, institutions and finance.
If space-based energy becomes a new infrastructure asset class, Luxembourg could play a role not only in building it, but in creating the financial architecture that allows it to scale.
There is a long road ahead. The engineering is difficult. Regulation must evolve. The economics must be proven. Success is not guaranteed.
But frontier technologies become investable as uncertainty is systematically converted into evidence, until what once looked impossible begins to look predictable.
Our job is to make space-based solar power boring. Because when investors stop seeing science fiction and start seeing infrastructure, it can begin to scale.
For most of history, energy power was determined by what lay beneath our feet.
The next chapter may be determined by what we can build above our heads.
