On a blustery November day in 2025, a Cessna turboprop fought its way through the skies over Pennsylvania. The conditions were miserable for flying: at an altitude of 5,000 meters, crosswinds whipped at 70 knots, nearly matching the speed of the small aircraft itself.
But for the engineers inside, the turbulence was a feature, not a bug. They were there to prove that a sensitive optical system could lock onto a target on the ground and hold it steady, even while being rattled by gale-force winds.
And it worked. As the plane bucked and swayed, a system onboard beamed energy down to a receiver on the ground, maintaining a connection despite the deeply chaotic motion.
This test flight, conducted by the Ashburn, Virginia-based startup Overview Energy, marks a major victory in the quest for transitioning civilization towards renewable energy. While the flight transferred only a small amount of electricity, it represents the first time power has been wirelessly beamed from a moving aircraft to a receiver on Earth.
It is a terrestrial proof-of-concept for a much wilder ambition: launching massive satellite arrays into geosynchronous orbit (GEO) to harvest constant sunlight and beam it back to humanity.