‘Change typhoon intensity and path’: China team mulls hitting cyclones with space beam

China should accelerate development of a space-based solar power station, as the technology could one day do far more than beam clean energy to Earth, it might even help tame typhoons, according to a senior Chinese engineer.Duan Baoyan, the lead scientist behind the ambitious “Zhuri” project – which aims to hold a megawatt-class demonstration in the Earth’s orbit by 2030 – said microwave beams generated by such a station to transmit electricity back to Earth could potentially be directed to heat moisture inside storm systems.“If the energy output were high enough, it could alter regional atmospheric circulation and change a typhoon’s intensity and path,” Duan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Xidian University in Xian, northwestern China, wrote in state-run People’s Daily on Monday.02:38Why are typhoons and other extreme weather events on the rise in Asia?Why are typhoons and other extreme weather events on the rise in Asia?He added that the plant could also charge satellites, space stations and deep-space probes, allowing them to operate for longer and travel farther. “Future space internet networks or even lunar bases may rely on this ‘space-based power bank’ technology,” he wrote.First proposed by Duan and his colleagues in 2013, the Zhuri (“chasing the sun”) project ultimately envisions building a kilometre-scale circular solar power station in geostationary orbit, about 36,000km (22,370 miles) above Earth, capable of generating gigawatt-level electricity.In 2022, his team built a 75-metre-tall test tower on campus to simulate the entire process on Earth, including tracking the sun, concentrating light, converting it into electricity, turning that electricity into microwaves, beaming it across a distance, and converting it back into electricity at a receiving antenna.Since then, the ground-based system has reached new technical milestones, including what Duan described as “one-to-many transmission”, allowing a single microwave transmitter to send power to multiple moving receivers at the same time rather than just one fixed target.