Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth?
Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth?
Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight. No clouds, no night time. Weirdly enough, earth is a more challenging environment in some ways for solar. You need to lay out >3x the number of panels on earth to get the same power production, and you need batteries or a grid interconnection as a buffer.
Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in many areas on earth. Locally, we have a number of people complaining about solar arrays going up on farmland, even though it's the farmers choosing to do it. "It's an eyesore".
> In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight
Only in a Sun-synchronous orbit, at specific elevations. Most 'normal' orbits have periods of shade.
Right, sorry, I meant in the orbits they're considering for these - I think they're mainly considering sun-sync.
How big is it? I have some space I’m not using, no pun intended.
How big are panels? If you get 60 cell panels, about 68x45 inches/1.7m x 1.1m. Our home array is 60 of those, 24kw.
Example of a spec sheet: https://signaturesolar.imagerelay.com/share/ffc69ee2265b4613...
If you mean the farmers' arrays, those are meant for commercial generation, so a good bit bigger, but one nice thing about solar is it's extremely modular, and you can fit it to the land. I believe bigger panels are more common for commercial, but I think it's a lot nicer to handle 40-50 pound panels than 70 pound panels.
You have to ask permission to build it somewhere. Nobody is going to stop you in space.
> Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth?
Because panel cap factor is about 10-20% to begin because day and night exists on earth. Say you wanted to power it on solar + batteries and picked Australia. You pick place that has decent port and most exposure, i.e. Port Hedland. In winter, daily average drops by 20%. Also because atmosphere - 30% less insolation when compared to space. Finally add 10-45% cooling losses.
Which effectively means you need something at least 10-20x more panels + batteries to match space.