I don't think it's that bad. The SpaceX Starship should be able to carry ~125 metric tons to Mars, and there will be cargo-only variants. You could ship ultrali

I don't think it's that bad. The SpaceX Starship should be able to carry ~125 metric tons to Mars, and there will be cargo-only variants. You could ship ultralight flexible solar panels in each Starship. Even if it's 40% less energy than on earth, I would say that's still not bad. You could easily fit enough panels to get a 100KW array in 10 metric tons of payload. You use the batteries from the ship itself to store the power for night time. If each cargo Starship can bring one such array, then you will pretty quickly have a megawatt of power generation. It's not huge, but if you pay attention to energy efficiency, it's enough to power tools to dig, lighting, heating, rovers, etc. As for dust, the Mars rovers have shown it's not a real issue, wind removes most of it, and if we actually have people there, we can occasionally clean the arrays too. Would I rather bring a nuclear reactor to Mars? Sure, but I also think we can make it work with just solar if we have to.