You know how people sometimes dismiss PV by saying "what happens at night or in cloudy weather?"?

Well, what happens over the course of a year of night and clouds is that 1 TW-peak becomes an average of about 110 to 160 GW.

We're making ~1 TW-peak per year of PV right now.

The 1TW is the rated peak power output. It's essentially the same in space. The thing that changes is the average fraction of this sustained over time (due to day/night/seasons/atmosphere, or the lack of all of the above).

It's still the same 1TW theoretical peak in space, it's just that you can actually use close to that full capacity all the time, whereas on earth you'd need to over-provision substantially and add storage, so 1TW of panels can only drive perhaps a few hundred GW of average load.

Funny, I would have included transportation as part of the installation cost. You didn't mention that one.

Yeah, soft costs like permitting and inspections are supposedly the main reason US residential solar costs $3/watt while Australian residential solar costs $1/watt. It was definitely the worst and least efficient part of our solar install, everything else was pretty straightforward. Also, running a pretty sizable array at our house, the seasonal variation is huge, and seasonal battery storage isn’t really a thing.

Besides making PV much more consistent, the main thing this seems to avoid is just the red tape around developing at huge scale, and basically being totally sovereign, which seems like it might be more important as tensions around this stuff ramp up. There’s clearly a backlash brewing against terrestrial data centers driving up utility bills, at least on the East Coast of the US.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like maybe not a terrible idea.

No maintenance either

We have so much excess land with no real use for it that our government actually pays farmers to grow corn on it to burn in cars.

Availability of land for solar production isn't remotely a real problem in the near term.

Realizing the impracticality of it (and that such approaches often collapse under the infeasibility of it) ... wouldn't it be better to... say... cover the Sahara in solar panels instead? That's gotta be cheaper than shipping them into space.

https://inhabitat.com/worlds-largest-solar-project-sahara-de...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/nov/01/solar-power...

(and a retrospective from 2023 - https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/ )

the demand is pretty much fake and AI isn't actually making money, just gobbling investors money

Solar can always just go on the roof...

I think this is all ridiculous, to be clear, but re: this problem couldn't the radiators in theory be oriented so that they vent in opposite directions and cancel out any thrust that would be generated?

For one or a few-off expensive satellites that are intended to last 10-20 years, then yes. But in this case the satellites will be more disposable and the game plan is to launch tons of them at the lowest cost per satellite and let the sheer numbers take care of reliability concerns.

It is similar to the biological tradeoff of having a few offspring and investing heavily in their safety and growth vs having thousands off offspring and investing nothing in their safety and growth.

Sure but like, just use even more solar panels? You can probably buy a lot of them for the cost of a satellite.

And in geostationary, the planet hardly ever gets in the way. They get full sun 99.5% of the year.

even at 10% (say putting it on some northen pile of snow) it is still cheaper to put it on earth than launch it

I'm all for efficiency, but I would think a hailstorm of space junk hits a lot harder than one of ice out on the farm.

Except it doesn't melt like regular hail so when further storms come up you could end being hit by the same hail more than once :\

> And then there’s that pesky night time and those annoying seasons.

The two options there are cluttering up the dawn dusk polar orbit more or going to high earth orbit so that you stay out of the shadow of the earth... and geostationary orbits are also in rather high demand.

That's not what I'm suggesting. The post says "deep space". If you're going to try to harvest even a tiny percentage of the sun's energy, you're not doing that in Earth's orbit. The comparison is a webcam feed from Mars.

> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power

Which satellites are operating from "deep space"?