A number of countries, including the United States and China, are working on projects to transmit electricity from space to consumers on Earth. The EU may soon join them. In response, Japan plans to conduct an experiment in 2025 that will allow testing of actually developed long-distance electricity transmission technologies. As part of the experiment, the scientists will try to send electricity from satellites to receiving ground stations.

In Japan, research in this area was previously led by a group of scientists led by Hiroshi Matsumoto, former president of Kyoto University, who became the first in the world to transmit energy using microwaves in space in the 1980s.

In 2009, scientists at Kyoto University succeeded in using microwaves to transmit energy from an airship 30 meters high to a user’s cell phone. In the same year, under the leadership of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan, a project on this subject was started, in which industrial companies, the government and higher education institutions participated.

In 2015, Japanese scientists carried out successful experiments to transmit microwave energy in the horizontal direction for 50 m and in 2018 for the same distance in the vertical direction. It is reported that attempts will be made to transmit energy at a distance of 1 to 5 km in the vertical direction in the future.

Similar projects for the further commercialization of energy transmission from space are being promoted by other countries. Especially in the USA, the research laboratory of the US Air Force and the California Institute of Technology are involved in the implementation of large-scale projects in this area and in the construction of a ground station for high energy uptake in China. According to Chongqing University’s project, microwave radiation from orbit has been going on for several years. The government decided to accelerate the start of experiments on energy transfer from orbit by 2 years – planned for 2028, before the planned 2030.