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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.
by ericd 5mo ago
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".
- dullcrisp 5mo agoHow big is it? I have some space I’m not using, no pun intended.
- ericd 5mo agoHow 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/ffc69ee2265b4613a6239419de2d9878 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.
- dingaling 5mo ago> 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.
- ericd 5mo agoRight, sorry, I meant in the orbits they're considering for these - I think they're mainly considering sun-sync.