In the dark hours of a frosty November night, at an undisclosed location in Pennsylvania, a solar panel array hummed to life. Three miles overhead, a small propellor plane held the cells in the crosshairs of an invisible ray of near-infrared light. The panels drank it in, converting the beam into electricity as if it were high noon on a summer day.
Those flickering white lights are the magic made visible by an infrared camera. The head-grabs belong to Overview Energy, a company fresh out of stealth with a stellar ambition to transform solar farms into baseload power sources. To do that, Overview is building satellites to collect sunlight from the place it never sets — geosynchronous orbit — and beam it as invisible, eye-safe infrared energy to utility-scale solar on the ground. Just your casual, civilization-reshaping stuff.
Building the first iteration of a literal Dyson Sphere is not an easy task. Case in point: Step one of that journey was to do something never done before (successfully transmit power from a flying aircraft to a solar array). They just stamped that into the history books. Step two is to do it from low Earth orbit. Consider it queued. Step three is to launch a fleet of satellites beaming gigawatts of power from 2030 onwards. Energy endgame.
Proof came first. Scale follows. As Marc Berte, Overview’s founder and CEO, told Heatmap, “there’s no functional difference from what we just did from an airplane to what we’re going to do in 10 years at gigawatts from space.”
Solar Has a Sunlight Problem.
Two graphs have defined the climate conversation this past year: the skyrocketing energy appetite of data centers and the breakneck growth of solar. On paper, a heavenly match. In reality, AGI needs energy all the time, and solar only shows up when the sun does too. Until the fastest-growing source of clean power can work around the clock, data centers will continue torching unholy amounts of gas. These days, what keeps us up at night is the existence of night itself.
The little sleep we do get is thanks to teams like Overview, who are engineering ways to juice more from existing utility-scale solar farms. The best way to overcome planetary limits is by leaving the planet altogether. A fleet of photon-harvesting satellites in orbit gives Overview precise control over supply so that they can triple a farm’s capacity without adding a single battery.
Consider residential energy demand, which rolls around the planet like a stadium wave and spikes in the evening when people return from work. Overview can simply command its satellites to chase the surge – beaming power to New York for one hour, to Honolulu the next, then on to a military base at the edge of Alaska. And because panels convert near-infrared light far more efficiently than sunlight — roughly 50% vs. 20% — a solar farm partnered with Overview will actually produce more energy at night.
Firming up solar energy doesn’t happen overnight (yet). More time and money will be spent investing in space solar energy – alongside the broader space economy – before we take solar from intermittent to baseload. But the investment pencils out because the prize is enormous. In case you haven’t already heard, energy is the new gold. We won’t bother writing specific numbers down for data center growth because they’ll be outdated by the time the light from your screen reaches your eyes. Just know this: demand is big, accelerating, and ripe for the taking.
Here Comes the Sun
.
The falling cost of reaching orbit has helped free Overview’s technology from the pages of science fiction and into reality. Now, the rising demand for always-on energy has made the financial math as clear as day.
Solar might still be the darling of the clean energy industry, but its inability to deliver baseload energy threatens to cap its potential. Overview knows that fair-weather solutions won’t cut it anymore.
Fresh off a $20m seed and a team fluent in photovoltaics, satellites, aerospace physics, and AI, Overview is gaining speed. Next up, a satellite in low Earth orbit, coming to a solar panel near you (Overview already has a launch date scheduled with SpaceX). And yes, they’re raising again and hiring anew. Sign on, put sunlight on the night shift, and sleep easy knowing you’re doing good and getting paid for it.
The post Solar Power Takes the Night Shift appeared first on Lowercarbon Capital.
