One of the first power purchase agreements for space-based solar is being announced today, and it’s with a data center. Virtus Solis Technologies, a Michigan-based startup working to put solar panels into space, signed a 20-year PPA with startup Brae Systems, which hopes to use the electricity — beamed back to Earth from satellites — to power the data centers it plans to build, not on land but underwater.
Per the agreement, Virtus Solis will provide 100 megawatts of 24/7 orbital solar power, amounting to over 875,000 megawatt-hours annually; Brae has the option to increase the agreement to 250 MW within three years from initial commercial operations.
Unlike a PPA for a typical solar project, power delivery is still years away — if it comes at all. John Bucknell, Virtus Solis founder and CEO, told Latitude Media he expects first power to happen around 2030, roughly when Brae Systems plans to launch its first megawatt-scale underwater data center. A lot needs to happen, including actually proving out the technology, in the interim.
“There are technical and financial milestones associated with both sides,” Bucknell said. “We agree to deliver power in the future… and they agree to purchase [it]. But obviously, we need to do our fiduciary duty along the way, and so do they.” For Virtus Solis, the milestones include putting a 100-kilowatt pilot plant into orbit within the next 24 months and securing project financing for its first 100 MW power plant, among other things.
But — as was true when Commonwealth Fusion Systems signed its first PPA with Dominion Energy in late 2024 — a PPA for a technology that hasn’t yet been proven at commercial scale is a symbolic as much as a financial agreement. In this case, it demonstrates that the market’s interest in space-based solar is becoming very real, as data centers’ need for power extends to encouraging even the most nascent technologies. Momentum has also come by way of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which earlier this year filed with the FCC for permission to deploy an orbital data center “constellation.”
The SpaceX concept, however, would have both the energy source and the compute located in space, with data sent back to Earth via optical links. Virtus Solis, meanwhile, takes a more “traditional” approach to space-based solar, Bucknell said. It aims to put solar cells in orbit, “where the sun always shines,” convert the energy into radio waves, and beam it back to Earth, where antennas would then receive them and convert them back into electricity once again.
“We operate in radio frequency physics as opposed to photovoltaic physics,” Bucknell said. “The power plants just happen to have an element in orbit and an element on the ground.”
The advantage of this approach is that solar power can be harvested at its maximum intensity 24/7, unencumbered by the cycle of night and day or by weather. It’s an idea that has existed for several decades, albeit in a niche corner of the energy and tech worlds, but has always been too expensive to become a reality. In fact, what is believed to be the first PPA for space-based solar was actually signed in 2009 between PG&E and startup Solaren, for 200 MW of capacity to be delivered starting in 2016. The contract was mutually cancelled in 2015, after Solaren failed to secure financing for its technology.
Bucknell says the prices of solar cells, electronics, and commercial space launches have since collapsed, making the idea more viable today than it was a decade ago.
Next steps
For the Brae Systems PPA, Virtus Solis’ plan is to launch its satellites on commercial heavy-lift rockets, such as the ones SpaceX operates, and assemble them in orbit into arrays of up to two kilometers across. Once in orbit, the arrays will beam radio waves down to a receiver station in Illinois, where the data center developer — clearly not shy about technological experimentation — plans to submerge its first data centers in the cooling ponds of a retiring coal-fired power plant. The radio waves would then be converted back into electricity and used to power the data center behind the meter.
The plan’s success hinges on many factors.
So far, Virtus Solis has not announced any funding raises and has operated mostly in stealth “for the last number of years,” Bucknell said, financing its operations through a mix of venture capital and government funding. The latter includes a roughly $2-million ARPA-E award won in January 2025 to develop the power electronics needed to make its wireless power transfer more efficient. The company plans to show the results of the work it has done for this award in a public demonstration scheduled for March 2027. Bucknell hopes that the demo will show that more than 50% of the electricity sent through its wireless link comes out as usable electricity on the other end; previous demos only managed about 4%.
But for this project, it would have to also find project financing, which can be tricky for the most cutting-edge technologies — though a PPA certainly helps.
And while it’s true the price of rocket launches has decreased since 2009, it’s certainly not cheap to get things into orbit. A commercial launch with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket costs $74 million. “All by ourselves, just this first power plant would be hundreds of launches of the Falcon series, and I think 18 launches of the Starship series,” Bucknell said. The prices of commercial launches with SpaceX’s Starship rockets, the most advanced model that has so far only done text flights, aren’t public at the moment.
Plus, while submerged data centers exist, most notably in China, they’re not in wide use yet, and Brae has yet to announce a successful deployment. Ultimately, the company aims to deploy its data centers in the deep sea, “where it’s nice and cold,” to replace the need for expensive cooling systems, according to Bucknell. But that would require using undersea cables to connect to Virtus Solis’ ground power plant, which come with a high price of their own.
Nonetheless, Bucknell is bullish that the timing is right to start moving some energy generation into space, where large constellations of internet satellites already operate. As proof, he points to SpaceX’s Gigabay factory in Texas, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2026, and which aims to produce up to 1,000 Starships a year by the end of the decade. Bucknell says each of those rockets could theoretically be launched up to 200 times.
“That’s a lot of rockets, and I don’t know that they would be building that if they didn’t think there was demand there,” Bucknell said, “so I think I’m aligned with SpaceX in that regard.”
In addition to the PPA with Brae, Bucknell says Virtus Solis is also in conversations with both utility and data center customers. “We have 2.3 GW of active negotiations — the closest ones are an opportunity in New Mexico, and the other one is in Central Africa,” he said.
