Trump Or Not, Space Solar Power Is Happening

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Oh the irony, it burns. US President Donald Trump is bending over backwards to make solar power less accessible here on Earth, but clever entrepreneurs are simply going behind his back to harvest it from outer space. The latest example is the California-based startup Aetherflux, which has zeroed in on the ability of space solar systems to skip the long wait times for a conventional, terrestrial power hookup.

Look, Up In The Sky … It’s Galactic Brain!

Harvesting solar power for space operations is as old as the Vanguard 1 satellite, launched by the US in 1959. Solar panels in space are now as common as lambs in springtime. However, in recent years, the space solar industry has begun to branch out in new directions. Startups like Aetherflux have been racing to see who can be first to harvest solar power in space and beam it down to Earth on a 24/7 basis, regardless of the weather.

That sounds like the stuff of science fiction — and at one time, it was — but the technology pieces are in place to transfer solar power from arrays in space to Earth wirelessly, and investors are smelling money in the water. Aetherflux’s space-to-Earth solar beaming plan first crossed the CleanTechnica radar in 2024 as a self-funded project of Robin Hood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, who founded Aetherflux and serves as CEO. Earlier this year, additional investors piled onto Aeitherflux to the tune of $50 million, enabling Bhatt to lay plans for launching his first orbiting solar power plant in 2026.

In addition, the AI boom has fostered the idea of launching solar-powered data centers into space and beaming the data down to Earth. Aetherflux has that angle covered as well. On December 9, the company announced plans to launch its first commercial, solar-powered orbiting data center in Q1 of 2027. If all goes according to plan, the system will scale up by adding nodes to create a constellation.

“The project, dubbed ‘Galactic Brain,’ offers a bypass to the current five-to-eight year time horizon for data centers to be built on Earth,” Aetherflux explained, while observing that “securing real estate, establishing utility connections and constructing new data centers can take more than half a decade.”

Bhatt also chipped in his two cents in a press statement. “The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy,” he said. “The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough.”

“Galactic Brain puts the sunlight next to the silicon and skips the power grid entirely,” Bhatt emphasized.

Space Solar Wins The War Against Solar Power

If that sounds like Bhatt is blowing a big, fat, solar powered raspberry at Trump, well, maybe. In July, Trump directed the US Department of the Interior to stop issuing permits for solar projects on federal lands. Solar projects on land under state, local, and private ownership are also in jeopardy if they require any type of federal permit.

The situation is so desperate that 143 US solar companies banded together to plead for a policy change. “Federal agencies are implementing this directive in a way that amounts to a nearly complete moratorium on permitting for any project in which the Department of Interior may play a role, on both federal and private land, no matter how minor,” they wrote in a letter dated December 4, addressed to all members of the US Senate and House of Representatives.

“Businesses need certainty in order to continue making investments in the United States to build out much-needed energy projects,” they emphasized. “Certainty must include a review process that does not discriminate by energy source.”

Is anybody here old enough to remember that Republican members of Congress and their allies in the conserve-o-sphere roundly criticized Democrats for “picking energy winners and losers” with policies that promoted domestic wind and solar power? How the worm has turned! Trump’s “American Energy Dominance” does just that. It excludes wind and solar — and only wind and solar, among all other domestic energy resources — from federal support.

Solar Power Is Just Better, That’s All

For the record, Trump’s energy policy does support other renewables, namely biomass, geothermal, and hydropower. Even the yet-to-emerge field of marine energy somehow made the cut. However, all of these domestic energy resources face formidable obstacles to scale-up, particularly so in the near term.

In contrast, the killer combo of solar and energy storage has already scaled. Together, solar and storage are widely acknowledged as the fastest and most economical way to add more utility-sized power plants to the US.

The Solar Energy Industries Association has the numbers to prove it. On December 9, the organization issued its latest report under the title “U.S. Solar Market Insight Q4 2025,” which leads off with the observation that the US solar power profile grew another 11.7 gigawatts in new capacity in Q3, making it the third-largest quarter on record for solar activity regardless of the ill winds blowing out of the White House.

“Despite actions in Washington targeting clean energy, solar and storage account for 85% of all new power added to the grid in the first nine months of the Trump Administration,” SEIA added with a twist of the knife.

Twisting the knife further, the SEIA report shows that the vast majority — 73% — of solar capacity installed so far in 2025 landed squarely in states carried by President Trump on Election Day 2024. In particular, SEIA name-checks Texas, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Kentucky, and Arkansas along with Utah.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the comment thread. Meanwhile, SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper had plenty to say.

“Remarkable growth in Texas, Indiana, Utah, and other states won by President Trump shows just how decisively the market is moving toward solar,” Hopper said in a press statement. “But unless this administration reverses course, the future of clean, affordable, and reliable solar and storage will be frozen by uncertainty and Americans will continue to see their energy bills go up.”

That’s not to say that all solar activity in the US will grind to a halt. The new SEIA report was prepared in collaboration with the firm Wood Mackenzie, which anticipates that 250 gigawatts in solar capacity will be added to the nation’s grid by 2030, Trump or no Trump. However, that figure reflects the impact of today’s partisan politics. “The solar industry would be well positioned to meet more of this new demand if existing constraints were alleviated, presenting upside to our forecast,” explained the head of solar research at Wood Mackenzie and lead author of the report, Michelle Davis.

Keep an eye on the space solar field for an alternative solution….

Image: The space solar power industry is gathering steam, with Aetherflux among the US startups working on space-to-earth and orbiting data center applications (screenshot, courtesy of Aetherflux).