At the beginning of April this year, Meta signed an agreement unlike any other in the energy sector. Its partner is the startup Overview Energy, a four-year-old company based in Ashburn, Virginia. The goal is to deliver up to 1 gigawatt of power from space-based satellites that will collect sunlight in orbit and transmit it as infrared light to ground-based solar farms. Commercial energy deliveries are expected to begin in 2030.
This is the first agreement of its kind in history. No other company has ever reserved capacity from a space-based solar power plant. If the project succeeds, Meta will become the first customer to receive energy directly from space.
Energy that never sleeps
Meta operates data centers that consumed more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2024. That is equivalent to the annual consumption of approximately 1.7 million American households. And as the company rolls out ever-larger artificial intelligence infrastructure, these figures will continue to grow.
The problem with renewable energy sources is simple: solar panels do not work at night, and wind turbines stop when the wind is not blowing. Large-scale battery storage systems are expensive and require a great deal of space. Nuclear power plants solve this problem, but they take years to build and require lengthy approval processes.
Meta is tackling this problem from all sides at once. It has signed agreements with Vistra, Oklo, and TerraPower for nuclear energy supplies, making it one of the largest corporate buyers of nuclear power in the world. It is building gigantic data centers, including the massive Hyperion complex in Louisiana and Prometheus in Ohio, which will be powered by nuclear energy. And now it is adding space-based solar power as a third option.
How does energy transmission from space work?
Earlier concepts for space-based solar power relied on microwaves or high-powered lasers to transmit energy to purpose-built receiving stations. These approaches encountered numerous technical, safety, and regulatory obstacles. Overview Energy has chosen a different approach. Its satellites will operate in geostationary orbit, where each will remain above the same location on Earth. From that altitude, they will transmit a wide, low-energy beam of near-infrared light directly to existing ground-based solar farms.
Solar panels on the ground will process this beam in exactly the same way as natural sunlight and convert it into electricity. This will allow a farm to generate power even at night, without any new infrastructure on the ground, without new grid connections, and without requiring additional land. CEO Marc Berte says the beam poses no danger to human eyes. Its intensity is lower than that of natural sunlight.
A thousand satellites above our heads
To supply Meta with this energy, Overview Energy plans to launch approximately 1,000 satellites into geostationary orbit by 2030. Each satellite is expected to remain in service for more than ten years. The resulting network would be able to cover roughly one-third of the planet. The initial deployment would extend from the west coast of the United States to Western Europe. As the Earth rotates and solar farms enter nighttime, the satellites would take over supplying them with light so they could continue generating electricity without interruption.
Berte describes it as a combination of energy generation and transmission with exceptional flexibility. “There’s a big difference between being present in one energy market and being present in all markets,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch.
The company is more than just a concept on paper. Overview Energy, which first emerged publicly in December 2025, has already demonstrated energy transmission from a moving airborne platform to the ground as a precursor to actual space-based transmission. In January 2028, it plans to launch a test satellite into low Earth orbit and conduct the first energy transmission from space.
Overview Energy’s advisory board includes Jim Bridenstine, a former NASA administrator and congressman, Mike Griffin, also a former NASA administrator, and Joseph Kelliher, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and vice president of federal regulatory affairs at NextEra Energy. This trio covers exactly the two fields in which Overview Energy must succeed simultaneously: space technology and energy regulation.
Risk vs. potential reward
The agreement does not explicitly guarantee that Overview Energy’s system will actually be built as planned. The financial terms were not disclosed. Commercial deliveries in 2030 would come eight years after the startup’s founding, while space-based solar power has yet to operate commercially anywhere in the world.
Nat Sahlstrom, Meta’s vice president of energy and sustainability, described it as follows: “Space-based solar technology represents a transformative leap forward by using existing ground-based infrastructure to deliver continuous energy from orbit.”
For Meta, the cost of signing an agreement with a pre-commercial startup is low compared with the potential benefit. If Overview Energy succeeds, Meta will secure a strategic advantage in the form of one gigawatt of continuous renewable energy for its data centers. If it does not, Meta will have lost only the cost of signing the agreement.
Overview Energy has introduced an entirely new unit of measurement for this agreement, megawatt-photons, which describes the amount of light power needed to generate one megawatt of electricity. That alone shows just how unusual this contract is.
Sources: reuters.com and overviewenergy.com
