Space-Based Ambient Power for Sensors and Other Low-Power Applications

Space Solar Power (SSP) may promise to deliver unlimited green energy to the surface of the earth through microwave power beaming, but it suffers from an "all-or-nothing" aspect of its deployment: one cannot begin to reap the benefit from even a test SSP system without billions of dollars of infrastructure launched into space and installed on the ground. However, space ambient power (SAP)-a blanketing of an urban area with very low-level microwave power to drive batteryless sensors, medium-range communication, and other applicationsis a much lower-cost proposition that could be used as a proving ground for SSP concepts.