> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://nexi.fund/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Space-Based Solar Just Signed Its First Paying Customer - URL: https://nexi.fund/virtus-solis-space-solar-ppa-2026/ - Published: 2026-10-14T07:30:04.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-14T07:30:04.000Z - Description: A Michigan startup and a subsea data-center builder signed a 20-year contract for electricity beamed from orbit, 100 MW of round-the-clock baseload. The physics are decades old. The economics are not yet proven. - Author: Nexi.fund Labs - Tags: Energy & Climate, #mode-1, #hook-character, #track-F, #layout-scene-weave, #brand-heavy John Bucknell spent his early career pushing propellant through rocket engines, a discipline that rewards moving energy through a hostile environment and losing as little of it as possible. In 2019 he aimed that instinct at a stranger problem: sending electricity down from orbit. On September 30, the Michigan company he founded, Virtus Solis, signed the first commercial power-purchase agreement for space-based solar. Brae Systems, a Chicago developer building GPU data centers on the sea floor, agreed to buy 100 megawatts of round-the-clock beamed power — 876,000 megawatt-hours a year — with an option to reach 250 MW within three years. It is the first time anyone has contracted firm baseload electricity generated in space. ## A power plant that never sees night The premise is a plain asymmetry. A solar farm on the ground fights clouds, winter and the daily loss of the sun. A satellite in the right orbit does not. Virtus Solis parks its arrays in Molniya orbits, long elliptical loops that hold a spacecraft in sunlight for most of a twelve-hour lap while it lingers high over the northern hemisphere. Each array is a bed of 1.65-meter solar tiles assembled in orbit by robots, converted to radio waves, and beamed to a receiver on the ground. The company's engineering target is 70% end-to-end efficiency. A first public demonstration of a complete wireless transfer is not due until March 2027. ## What Brae is actually buying Brae is not a utility. It sinks sealed GPU data centers to the seabed, where cold water handles cooling and land is not a constraint. Water solves heat. It does not solve the power bill, or the years a large new load can spend waiting in an interconnection queue. Brae is betting orbital generation skips both. > AI workloads require an unprecedented leap in both energy availability and thermal efficiency. Brae engineered underwater data centers to unlock natural free liquid cooling and bypass terrestrial bottlenecks.— Vishnu Indukuri, chief executive, Brae Systems The sale is narrower than the slogan. Bucknell is marketing the grid's constraints, not its carbon. “High-performance AI data centers demand uninterrupted, gigawatt-scale power that strained terrestrial grids simply cannot deliver cleanly,” he said. The beam lands without a transmission line, a battery farm or a permitting fight. 100 MW orbital baseload #### Initial capacity in the Virtus Solis–Brae contract 876,000 MWh a year from a dedicated receiving station in Illinois, with an option to 250 MW. *Virtus Solis, Sept 2026* ## The money arrived first Capital has moved ahead of the hardware. Tracked investment in space-based solar power rose from about $1.07 billion in 2024 to $1.9 billion in 2025 and roughly $5.3 billion in 2026, by the count of analysts who follow the sector. Meta has reserved up to a gigawatt from a rival, Overview Energy. Star Catcher raised $65 million in May and is preparing an orbital power-beaming demonstration this fall. As we wrote in September, [Google's Project Suncatcher](https://nexi.fund/google-project-suncatcher-orbital-ai-2026/) pushed the first AI chips into orbit to test whether compute can live where the sun never sets. The two bets are cousins. One moves compute to the energy; the other moves the energy to the compute. The direction of travel is a response to a real squeeze. Data centers are forecast to add 80 to 160 terawatt-hours of demand by 2030, and the grids that would serve them are already congested. A seller who can promise firm power without a queue has something worth paying for — if the promise holds. ## How the beam reaches the ground Beaming power is older than the satellites that would carry it. Researchers moved energy by microwave in the 1960s, and NASA published a full space-solar reference design in 1980\. What blocked the idea was never the transmitter. It was the cost of lifting mass into orbit and the difficulty of assembling large structures once there. Both constraints have moved. Reusable launch has pulled the price per kilogram down by an order of magnitude, and rideshare missions now fly small payloads on a schedule rather than a hope. Robotic assembly is the harder half, and it is the subject of Virtus Solis's 2024 partnership with Orbital Composites, meant to build the arrays tile by tile in medium-Earth orbit. The transmission itself is deliberately undramatic. Virtus Solis uses radio-frequency beams rather than a laser, on the argument that radio passes through weather with almost no loss and stays diffuse enough to be safe across a receiving field. The company claims 99.9% uptime and a beam no more intense, in aggregate, than ordinary sunlight. Competitors have picked different trades. Star Catcher points optical beams at satellites already in orbit, selling power to spacecraft rather than to the ground. Overview Energy aims a near-infrared beam at existing terrestrial solar farms so they keep producing after dark without new land. Cowboy Space, formerly Aetherflux, is chasing a mix of remote sites and orbital compute. The approaches disagree about the customer, not about the physics. Government interest has followed the capital. Space-solar power beaming has drawn feasibility contracts from agencies that want power at remote or austere sites, a market where the alternative is diesel hauled in at high cost. ## What the last first looked like Space-based solar has a precedent, and it is cautionary. In 2009 Pacific Gas and Electric signed a 200 MW power-purchase agreement with a startup called Solaren, to be delivered from orbit starting in 2016\. The contract was cancelled in 2015 before a single watt arrived, after Solaren failed to finance the hardware. Bucknell argues the inputs that killed it have since collapsed. Solar cells, power electronics and, above all, launch costs sit at a fraction of their 2009 levels. He is pitching an eventual price near $30 per megawatt-hour, roughly the cost of firm fossil generation. That figure is a target, and targets have a poor record in this sector. The scale is also easy to misread. A 100 MW plant is not one machine. Virtus Solis's own architecture implies on the order of 100,000 small satellites for that capacity, assembled in orbit, each carrying part of the array. The March 2027 demonstration will beam power across a lab, not from a constellation. ### Does orbital baseload survive its first dispatch? 🔮 **Virtus Solis delivers power to a paying customer before the end of 2030.** Probability: 55% — the offtake value is large enough to fund the March 2027 demonstration, but no watt has yet been transmitted commercially, and the first arrays do not exist. #### 🟢 Optimistic (30%) Launch prices keep falling, the 2027 demonstration clears its efficiency hurdle, and a second and third offtake follow within two years. **Consequence:** orbital baseload becomes a niche but bankable product for compute buyers who cannot wait for a grid connection. #### 🟡 Base case (50%) The demonstration slips, costs per megawatt-hour stay well above the $30 target, and the contract is renegotiated down or extended in timeline. **Consequence:** the deal survives on paper while first power keeps receding. #### 🔴 Pessimistic (20%) Assembly in orbit proves far harder than assembly on the ground, financing stalls, and the contract joins the 2009 Solaren deal as a signed agreement that never delivered. **Consequence:** the sector keeps raising money on the strength of the idea rather than the output. 📊 **Signals to watch** The March 2027 wireless-transfer demonstration and its measured end-to-end efficiency Whether Virtus Solis announces the additional offtakes it says are close A named receiving-station site actually constructed in Illinois Rival milestones from Star Catcher, Overview Energy and Cowboy Space The agreement is real, and so is the money behind it. What remains unproven is the claim underneath the paperwork: that electricity beamed from orbit can cost less than the grid it avoids. Until a receiver in Illinois actually lights up, this is a contract with the future. [ Virtus Solis signs PPA to supply space-based solar power to datacenter developer Brae Systems Trade coverage of the contract, with the Molniya-orbit architecture and Bucknell's own framing of the deal. pv magazine USA ](https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/10/01/virtus-solis-signs-ppa-to-supply-space-based-solar-power-to-datacenter-developer-brae-systems/?ref=nexi.fund) The clearest technical read on how the power is meant to travel from orbit to Illinois. [ A data center company signed a PPA for space solar power Connects the deal to the unbuilt history of space solar, including the PG&E–Solaren contract that collapsed a decade ago. Latitude Media ](https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/a-data-center-company-signed-a-ppa-for-space-solar-power/?ref=nexi.fund) The skeptical context the press release leaves out. [ Virtus Solis signs 20-year space solar PPA with Brae Systems for up to 250 MW Carries the contract terms in full, including the Illinois receiving station and the 2.19 million MWh expansion figure. North American Clean Energy ](https://www.nacleanenergy.com/solar/virtus-solis-signs-landmark-20-year-space-solar-ppa-with-brae-systems-to-deliver-250-mw-of-orbital-baseload-clean-power?ref=nexi.fund) Where the headline numbers come from.