The California Public Utilities Commission approved yesterday Pacific Gas & Electric’s plan to purchase electricity from an orbiting solar panel plant in outer space, provided that it is successfully deployed. The San Francisco utility announced in April its space-ward intentions, and now that it has received the official green light from state regulators, it has contracted to buy 1,700 gigawatt-hours per year for 15 years from Solaren Corporation (website still presumably under construction), a startup from Los Angeles that plans to place satellites equipped with an array of solar panels into orbit, where they would soak up the sun’s rays—undiluted by atmospheric debris and uninterrupted by bad weather or nightfall—to fuel energy users down on Earth. Or so the hope is, anyway.

The plant, which has an expected generating capacity of 200 megawatts and which Solaren plans to launch in June 2016, will transmit the solar power that it generates down to a site in Fresno, California, via microwaves, which—unlike lasers—can beam through clouds.  Solaren, which is headed by veterans from aerospace companies, has already developed a system centered around a kilometer-wide Mylar mirror, for the purpose of concentrating sunlight onto the solar panels and extracting more power from them.

Naturally, skeptics abound, especially since Solaren has kept the details of its technology largely under wraps and the hype over the project is so enormous. Yet even some of those questioning their own optimism over the project have expressed their faith in it, even if it never gets off the ground. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“I’ll be the first to admit that our reach may exceed our grasp in this instance,” said Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, which unanimously approved PG&E’s agreement with Solaren on Thursday. “But in the words of poet Robert Browning, ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ “

And to bolster this concern over delusions of grandeur, PG&E said that it would only pay for the electricity if Solaren delivers the goods. One step for solar, one step for mankind? Only time will tell, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed.