Stratospheric Grid: A Wireless Power Transfer Enabled HAP Network with Integrated Generation-Grid-Load-Storage Functions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel stratospheric energy grid using wireless power transfer and reconfigurable high-altitude platform nodes to enhance continuous operation, resilience, and energy management across the stratosphere, satellites, and terrestrial systems.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic, integrated generation-grid-load-storage system with peer-to-peer energy exchange and cooperative scheduling for HAP networks, addressing intermittent power and operational challenges.

Findings

Enables flexible energy roles for HAP nodes based on their status.

Supports energy sharing among HAPs, satellites, and terrestrial grid.

Improves energy utilization and operational resilience.

Abstract

Conventional high-altitude platforms (HAPs) face challenges in achieving continuous all-weather operation due to intermittent photovoltaic power generation, limited energy storage capacity, and high mission loads resulting from functional integration. To address this fundamental issue, we propose a stratospheric energy grid in which wireless power transfer (WPT) interconnections constitute the grid layer, while HAPs operate as dynamically reconfigurable integrated generation-grid-load-storage (IGGLS) nodes that harvest, buffer, consume, and peer-to-peer transfer energy for constellation-level balancing and resilience. In this system, each HAP node can flexibly switch among energy source, load, and storage roles according to its energy status and mission requirements, enabling energy exchange and spatiotemporal optimization within the stratosphere. Through cooperative scheduling, the stratospheric grid not only enables surplus-to-deficit energy support among HAPs but also extends upward to satellites and downward to the terrestrial grid and communication infrastructure, forming a heterogeneous, WPT-mediated interconnection. As an IGGLS ecosystem, it exploits peer-to-peer energy logistics, spatiotemporal smoothing of intermittency, cross-domain backup via the terrestrial grid, and service-aware dispatch, thereby boosting overall energy utilization and operational resilience. The proposed approach is validated through case studies, and we delineate an agenda of feasible research directions.