Meta Wants to Beam Solar From Space. The Real Race Is Unfolding (Literally) on the Ground.

This April, Meta announced something that would have sounded like science fiction five years ago. It signed a deal to receive up to one gigawatt of solar power beamed to Earth from satellites in geostationary orbit, where they face the sun almost around the clock. That power would be delivered starting in 2030 to existing solar farms on the ground, with no new receiving hardware required.

The startup behind it, Overview Energy, is taking a deliberately different path from traditional space-based solar power. Conventional designs collect sunlight in orbit, convert it to microwaves, and beam it to large ground receivers called rectennas, the specialized antennas that turn microwaves back into electricity. Utility-scale solar farms make natural hosts for rectennas, since they already have power infrastructure, grid ties and open space. But rectennas are still separate, land-hungry pieces of hardware, and they can raise health, community and permitting questions.

Overview's satellites instead beam energy as near-infrared light, which is barely visible and sits within the wavelength range that standard silicon cells already absorb during normal operation. The beam is deliberately held at intensities comparable to natural sunlight, which is what makes it safe for eyes and wildlife. Overview describes it as safer than a supermarket barcode scanner.

For solar power operators, the implication is striking. A well-sited solar farm in a high-sun region becomes a near-24/7 clean energy asset, and the overnight trough that once demanded enormous battery investment gets filled from orbit instead.

When the beam reaches the farm, the panels treat it exactly as they would sunlight. They absorb it, convert it, and send it through the existing inverters to the grid. No rectenna, no modifications, no new ground infrastructure.

When a company the size of Meta is willing to look 22,000 miles up for electricity, it tells you how severe the energy supply problem has become down here. Hyper-innovative companies like Overview are reaching for orbit because the demand for clean, around-the-clock power has grown so intense that the boldest, most-audacious solutions start to look rational.

Those problems are worth naming plainly:

Consistency. Data centers run every hour of every day, and the sun does not (at least on Earth). Batteries can bridge the overnight gap, but they’re expensive and still rely on the same scarce grid connections for backup.

Speed. The power is needed now, not in five years. The gap between signing a tenant and energizing a site is where projects are won or lost.

Land. Communities are increasingly intolerant of massive, land-intensive solar farms, so power yield per acre matters more than ever.

All three pressures point to the same often-overlooked place. Before the data center boom, a few cents off a panel was the headline. Now, the step change in economics doesn't come from panel costs, but from the steel it sits on, and how that steel goes into the ground.

Racking Now Matters More Than Falling Panel Costs

Utility-scale solar has been the cheapest new-build generation in the USA for 10 years running. The industry added 43.2 GW of capacity across the country in 2025 alone – more than all other forms of power combined.

But cheaper panels don’t help if you have to buy twice the land to deploy them.

And falling panel prices certainly do not help if these incremental price drops never recoup the revenue lost to a slow build. Especially if delays trigger liquidated damages for contracted power that couldn’t be delivered on time.

East-West High-Density Systems: The Architecture Shift That Changes Everything

East-west high-density systems work differently. They orient panels in two directions at once, one face catching the morning sun and the other the afternoon, each at an angle shallow enough to keep generating all day without casting shade on its neighbors. Freed from the steep tilts whose shadows force conventional rows apart, east-west systems can cover almost the entire site with very little gap between rows. At ground coverage ratios of up to 80%, capacity per acre can be double that of conventional tracking.

Without shadows, the remaining determinant of ground coverage on east-west systems is how maintenance access is arranged. Where panels are fixed directly on or close to the ground, narrow service corridors, usually about half a meter, are needed between every other row. Where panels are raised, crews can service them from underneath, which removes most of those non-generating corridors. The trade is that extra elevation can degrade wind ratings and increase installation time.

Installation speed

On a pure installation basis - setting aside interconnection, transformer, and permitting delays, which gate every technology equally - high-density east-west racking stands up capacity about twice as fast as conventional fixed-tilt and single-axis trackers.

Two leading east-west racking companies are achieving these rapid installation rates: Australia-based 5B and Germany-based Jurchen Technology GmbH. Each uses a different approach:

5B’s approach is to deliver panels and racks that have been factory-prefabricated and wired. Its “Maverick” solution can be unfolded in place on site, set by a 3-4 person crew with an all-terrain telehandler (the industrial cousin of a forklift with an extending boom). In one recently-documented deployment, a crew of four installed 1 MW in a single day after site and ground prep, an area about the size of a soccer pitch. That brings revenue forward by half the build time, without the safety and staffing risks of large-crew construction.

Pre-wiring reduces the chances of experiencing more than a dozen distinct failure modes that have been identified by PVEL and HelioVolta’s safety guides for solar connectors assembled in the field. These include contamination by foreign particles, corrosion from rain, nicked wires, improper torque, bad crimps and counterfeit parts. Pre-assembled and pre-wired racks sidestep most of them, and they reduce the call on licensed electricians, who are in very short supply during the current power buildout. Because field-made DC connections are also a leading cause of long-term yield loss, pre-assembly doesn’t just save labor during construction. It improves performance across the system's 25-year life.

Jurchen achieves its installation speed via its lightweight, minimalist design: Its “PEG” system uses very few components (mainly steel rods/poles, base plates, and top plates), with each part weighing ~3 kg. The overall system is up to 78% lighter in steel than traditional fixed-tilt or tracker systems. These steel rods are simply rammed into the ground using handheld power tools, followed by securing modules with just 2 screws per module. No heavy machinery required. Projects can achieve 1+ MW installation per week with relatively small teams.

Terrain Variability

For our New Mexico desert projects, caliche, a concrete-hard calcium-carbonate layer that forms naturally over thousands of years in arid soils, can appear as shallow as 15-30 cm. It’s notorious for bending and deflecting steel piles as they’re driven into the ground. In the southeast of the state, the caliche sits over the interbedded limestone and sandstone of the Permian Basin, a potential double hazard.

To reduce the challenge of driving into these types of surfaces, the 5B solution offers substantially fewer, smaller and shallower ground penetrations and can support  fully-ballasted zero-penetration setups.

While Jurchen requires denser and deeper ground penetrations, its elevated, rebar-anchored east-west systems can handle slopes up to 20 degrees, making it well-suited for the rocky slopes and irregular ground that exists on portions of all our properties.

Eliminating the need for excavation, trenching for cables and the deep ground penetration significantly reduces the odds of hitting at least some unpredictable sub-surface obstacles. It turns random, site-wide schedule risks into contained, local engineering problems, thereby removing one of the most common sources of delay on a solar build.

Wind and Water Resilience

5B’s ground-based system has been independently certified to up to 200mph under recognized structural wind standards, higher than Jurchen’s elevated east-west racks, with both solutions significantly higher than traditional south-facing racks.

Both systems’ 8-10 degree tilts are no accident – they sit below the 15-30 degree band where wind loads increase and induce substantial dynamic effects and other factors that damage fixed-tilt structures. They remain above the minimum angle that lets rain and dew run off and clean the panels passively, without robotic washers. For our projects that sit in windy, desert expanses, the wind resilience offered by these systems is a must-have.

Conventional Racking Systems Are Still the Norm

Conventional Fixed-Tilt. The oldest and simplest layout sets panels at a fixed angle facing south, typically 15-30 degrees from horizontal. This remains the most common racking setup for non-utility grade projects. It has no moving parts, low complexity and low capital cost. Fixed-tilt still competes in specific cases: rooftops, brownfield sites with minimal land cost, and lower-wind regions where the steeper tilt does not create structural problems. For large-scale solar to power AI data centers, its land inefficiency and weak daily profile are real disadvantages against the alternatives.

Single-Axis Trackers (SAT). The current utility-scale default across the US and most of the world is the single-axis tracker, rows of panels that rotate to follow the sun from east to west on a motorized axis, usually paired with bifacial n-type TOPCon modules. Trackers deliver 12-25% more annual energy than south-facing fixed-tilt. On flat, open land with patient schedules and plentiful labor, they remain the lowest-cost option per megawatt-hour.

Their limits in data center work are real. Tracker rows need wide corridors to avoid shading one another at low sun angles, so ground coverage typically runs 30-45% of the site. They add motors and controls, and the maintenance that comes with them. Their midday peak is structurally mismatched to a flat, around-the-clock load. And in high wind areas, trackers carry the highest aeroelastic risk of any ground-mount design, which is why most now use stow algorithms that lay the panels flat in a storm, taking them out of generation when they are most exposed.

For a campus that needs the cleanest energy that it can possibly get from a constrained, near-grid site on a tight schedule, the tracker is increasingly a distant second choice.

Module Technology: What Goes on Top Matters Too

Most east-west racking systems can accommodate modules from every major manufacturer, so a project can ride the cell-technology curve independent of its mounting choice. For us, the market’s move from PERC to n-type TOPCon cells is a boon as they hold their efficiency better – particularly in desert heat - and degrade more slowly over a 25-year life. Bifacial construction adds real-world yield over bright, reflective desert ground at little extra cost; and perovskite-silicon tandem cells, already past 34% efficiency in the lab, are the next leap. However, they have limited lifetime and are unlikely to be deployable at utility-scale for several years.

Project Economics

There is a real financial nuance to rapid deployment. The developer who stages deployment over an extended period buys later tranches of solar panels at lower future prices. Panel prices have fallen about 20% with every doubling of global capacity for four decades, so a developer using longer-install solutions like the rebar-anchored or conventional racking systems will buy those modules less expensively than a prefabricated-system developer who installs far more in year one.

The counterweight is revenue. The prefabricated, ground-based system can deliver high-margin power from initial modules almost immediately. In a market where data centers pay premium prices and every megawatt of compute has real economic value, early generation usually dwarfs the module savings from waiting.

And on the land question, consider this. Module prices may keep falling, but the price of the best-sited solar land near grid infrastructure tilts up. A developer who buys twice the land because they chose a lower-density system did not get that land for free, and the module savings from waiting do not offset the cost of buying more of it.

Which brings us back to the satellites. Whether or not they ever fly, the fact that serious companies are signing on is the tell. Demand for clean, constant power has outrun the conventional solutions, and the smartest response is not to wait for the next cheap panel. It is to build faster, denser and tougher now, with the racking, the foundations and the architecture that actually move the numbers.

Jason Bak is the CEO of Green Data Center Real Estate Inc. and a 20+ year renewable energy executive. Green Data is building solar-powered data centers in New Mexico and Texas.