Tech behemoth Meta is dabbling in space-based solar as part of an effort to generate 24-hour power from solar.

The Menlo Park, CA-based company behind Facebook is hoping to beam one gigawatt of solar energy direct from space to increase the capacity of existing solar farms and help them deliver power around the clock. Meta, known in Canada for blocking Canadian audiences’ access to Canadian media, announced the deal with Virginia-based space technology start-up Overview Energy in late April.

“Space solar technology represents a transformative step forward by leveraging existing terrestrial infrastructure to deliver new, uninterrupted energy from orbit,” Nat Sahlstrom, Meta’s vice president of energy and sustainability, said in a statement.

““Our approach to space solar energy enables hyperscalers and technology providers to secure clean power with reliable siting, and speed to power,” added Overview CEO Marc Berte. “Together with Meta, we’re looking beyond traditional constraints on where and when power can be delivered to meet the growing demand for electricity.”

In the same announcement April 27, Meta said it would look to Palo Alto-based Noon Energy for 1 GW/100 GWh of ultra-long-duration storage. The media release did not indicate dollar value, electricity costs, or firm timelines for either venture.

For Overview, “details on the startup’s agreement with Meta are sparse so far,” Latitude Media reports. “The hyperscaler declined to comment on investment terms, including whether the tech giant has made any upfront financial investments or what it anticipates the eventual cost-per-megawatt of the power to be beamed down will be. As far as whether Meta is including this gigawatt of space-based solar in its data centre power generation plans, the company said it is continuing to evaluate how that energy will be deployed.”

Both projects “are part of a scramble by AI companies to secure power for their data centres,” Space News writes. “That has, in some cases, led to public backlash regarding the environmental impacts of those centres and increased energy costs.” But neither of those challenges was enough to dampen the enthusiasm in the Meta release.

“Advancing AI at the speed and scale we’re working toward requires more energy, but today’s clean energy technologies have real limits: solar depends on sunlight, wind depends on weather, and the grid still needs more storage to make the most of both,” it states. “From collecting solar energy in orbit to storing renewable power for days at a time, we’re supporting the advancement of innovative technologies that can deliver reliable energy at the scale AI demands—while strengthening America’s energy leadership.”

While the deal with Overview is not a firm contract, Meta confidently predicts that “we’ll deploy up to 1 GW of this orbit-to-grid energy to support our data centre operations,” after becoming “one of the first major technology companies to secure a capacity reservation for space solar energy.” Latitude Media has a rather more sober take.

“It’s a long shot,” the U.S. news site writes. “The promise of space-enabled 24/7 solar has long faced skepticism, in large part because shooting solar panels into space and maintaining them for several decades is very, very expensive. Overview faces most of the same core hurdlee as its space solar peers: namely, that given the high costs of operating in space, the process of converting energy into infrared light and back again would need to be very efficient to have a hope of competing with increasingly cheap grid-scale batteries on the ground.”

News reports refer to Overview “emerging from stealth” last December. Publicly available data from Morningstar’s PitchBook presents the company as an early-stage VC with 25 employees, 11 investors, and total share value of about US$3.7 million.

Meta is expressing confidence that Overview can complete an “orbital demonstration” by 2028 and begin commercial delivery to the United States as early as 2030. The space tech company’s website echoes the 2028 target date for achieving an energy transfer from low earth orbit. But it indicates only that proving and then scaling up energy transfer from geosynchronous orbit—the milestone Meta is looking for—is “upcoming”.

Low earth orbit is “far lower than the 36,000 kilometres above the planet that [Overview] eventually plans to operate from,” Latitude Media writes.