The future of electricity is local
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
- powerlines work as a grid, NYC to Texas happens to cross several other cities which heavily mutualizes cost of the infrastructure. The question is not will those lines be profitable for the 2h NYC need power. It's the overall need that matters.
- energy transport represents 6% of current electric cost. To make the grid irrelevant for economic reason would suggest that energy price will changed from an order of magnitude.
- energy transport also innovates and improves.
If you are interested, this report from the MIT has a section about the future of the grid: http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/MITEI-The-F...
A rural electric grid may well be losing doubled digit percentage of electricity to crappy transformers, and low voltage.
And you may get 90%+ efficient delivery if you live in a dense megalopolis.
The cost of running power lines is an order of magnitude more expensive than the cost to transmit power over established lines.
6% is in the ballpark of electricity loss during transmission (and even that is on the low end - depending on how the last mile delivery is done, the lower voltage cables and transformers near the consumer can easily push it up to 10%+), but that isn't the main part of the cost, that is dominated by the cost of building and maintaining the delivery infrastructure.
In 2019, RTE spent 426M euros/year in long distance transportation of electricity on a 20B electricity market - we have to remember that transport also includes the real estate (80M), admin (161M), local grid (789M) according to https://www.rte-france.com/en/finance/key-figures-financial-... Those figures are stable year over year. Year over year may seem insufficient as it doesnt consider the initial investment, but remember we already have most of the grid in place already, so that's what matters to me.
The "trick" is to make use believe that local removes transport cost, but the truth is that we still need a local grid and space to put it, which is the bulk of the cost.
Overall I consider the grid to be a low cost solution we put in place years ago when we were poorer and things cost a ton because of the manual labor - but now we already got it so why not considering it only for its cost to maintain and expand and not overall cost to "deploy" as the article did.
Power generation becomes entirely local via fuel cells. Since hydrogen can be stored for long periods of time, the intermittency problem goes away.
Although there would be a near-term loss of efficiency, the sheer simplicity of the solution is remarkable. It even eliminates the issue of down power lines cause fires, which is a major issue in California today.
1. Hydrogen is hard to contain and store cheaply; it's so light it escapes containers easily
2. Hydrogen is kind of explodey
Hydrogen isn't flammable unless it is mixed with oxygen. That's the same with any other chemical fuel.
The benefit of storing magnesium hydride is it's much easier to store safely in large volumes than hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas leaks through everything, it's just so small. On the other hand, you have to collect spent material (presumably at "gas stations") and return it to the energy farm, which is more complex than the one-way delivery system you'd have with hydrogen. Still seemed like an interesting idea.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
We will likely end up using hydrogen in three situations: chemical feedstocks, some industrial heat processes that may want some reduction too, and backup grid generation. Switching pipelines to hydrogen has huge, unsolved problems. The energy density is far lower, meaning that even with current demand, natural gas pipelines repurposed to hydrogen would be inadequate. Already, building new pipelines for NG is so difficult that LNG storage is deployed to relieve congestion. Hydrogen would make that far worse. And there are many small things, like making the pipelines robust to the damaging effects of hydrogen, and even coming up with some sort of odorant like the mercapten in natural gas; we don't have any chemicals that can work at the moment.
There is a lot of appeal to hydrogen, and with a decade of intense industrial development we may be able to make carbon-free electrolysis derived hydrogen economical for many use cases. But it won't be many, IMHO.
I think the only valid point he made is that electricity is more efficient in a lot of circumstances. But we already knew that, and in fact it's arguably not worth pursuing in a world that will be soon awashed in green energy. Plus, all of the other problems unrelated to efficiency look devastatingly hard if our goal is to have a pure zero emissions world.
Ultimately, it's exactly what Arthur Clarke warned us about regarding old people making predictions. So no, this not a "clear headed" analysis but arguably a document of luddite thinking.
> Switching pipelines to hydrogen has huge, unsolved problems. The energy density is far lower, meaning that even with current demand, natural gas pipelines repurposed to hydrogen would be inadequate. Already, building new pipelines for NG is so difficult that LNG storage is deployed to relieve congestion. Hydrogen would make that far worse. And there are many small things, like making the pipelines robust to the damaging effects of hydrogen, and even coming up with some sort of odorant like the mercapten in natural gas; we don't have any chemicals that can work at the moment.
We've been piping hydrogen for decades, so this is mostly a solved problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_pipeline_transport
Hydrogen will only mean larger tanks and bigger pipes compared to natural gas. This is a vast improvement over batteries or other physically based energy storage, which are dozens to hundreds of times less energy dense. You can easily figure out that the latter cases would be truly enormous in comparison, not to mention needing something much more complicated than just underground caverns.
Furthermore, there's no practical way of moving electricity across oceans. I mean yes, you can build HVDC underwater and that works to some extent, but it quickly becomes ridiculously expensive if you try to connect distant landmasses in a giant web of connected grids. With hydrogen, you are looking at shipping hydrogen like LNG.
At a basic level, you're looking at a grid that works just like the existing one, only much cleaner and slightly more expensive. Only difference this time you can put the fuel cells very close to the end-customer since there are no CO2 or NOx emissions. This nearly eliminates the need for giant overhead powerlines, itself a major benefit. Compared to the vast complexity of what we're seeing with the "macrogrid" this looks very doable.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32812
Also, you report from MIT is 10 years old. The past decade has shown the most transformative decade of grid-related technology development in the past century, and the MIT report from 10 years ago didn't anticipate any of it. I don't blame them, most people were caught way off guard. But there's no reason to read it today except to study the history of what people were thinking back then. We are in an entirely different age.
As an example, transmission and distribution costs were roughly equal to generation costs in CA in 2016.
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUCWebsite/Content/Ab...
I wonder if BYD's new higher-density lithium iron batteries will take over stationary storage. Supposedly, the energy density per unit volume is comparable to lithium-ion, but they're heavier. The big advantage is that they're safer - the chemistry will not go into thermal runaway. You can buy them now in AU and NZ.[1]
[1] https://www.currentgeneration.co.nz/store/p166/BYD_-Battery_...
Stationary storage should not cost > 200 $/kwh and hopefully as demand accelerates we see these prices soon.
But even this way, I don't see battery storage becoming a thing economics wise, except in places where electricity supply itself is unreliable.
Grid scale storage can be made incomparably cheaper with things other than batteries, especially if storage periods are just few hours.
1. They can last effectively forever with periodic electrolyte topoff, proper charge control, decent thermal management, and good contaminant prevention policies.
2. They (and their electrolyte effluvia) aren't terribly toxic.
Most other utility scale chemistries have limited lifespans and degrees of toxicity and disposal/recycling difficulties.
Hell, this could even be a Long Now project: design and operate a 10,000 year utility-scale NiFe battery. There's no theoretical reason why not.
https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/heated-volcani...
While I'm mostly a green-optimist with panels on my roof, I'm a little concerned about seasonality; it's hard to store for six months.
Your biggest consumption/production variance is within 24 hours.
Though, 26 vs 0.15 kwh variance is still nothing in comparison to the worst daily production on record, and nil you get at night.
Well, can only say that there is nothing even imaginable on the horizon to being practical for seasonal scale energy storage. Even for a small country as UK, you will need a small ocean to store enough energy for one season worth of consumption.
The best solid fuel you can dig out of the earth has a "plug efficiency" of few percents.
It took evolution billions of years to get to capture carbon this efficiently.
Now, think of how feasible it is to contend with nature when it comes to thermodynamic processes.
More and more electronics are rectifying the AC to DC anyway (e.g. my fridge is variable-frequency drive), but usually stepping it down since they'll have a transformer for isolation anyway.
The current losses may be less than inversion (and rectification) losses.
The big problem these days is that AC appliances are cheap and DC appliances get charged the 'off-grid' tax, so you just throw more cheap panels at the problem.
Maybe one day incinerating toilets won't cost $4k.
I don't think retrofitting residential rooftop solar is necessarily such a great idea given the high installation cost. It'll make much more sense on large flat roofs like on strip malls. Residential electricity users will probably get more bang for their buck by being able to take advantage of fluctuating spot prices - e.g. with intelligent storage heaters.
It'll make sense on newbuilds though. If you're already building a roof, why not make it generate a bit of electricity? The installation cost will already be built in.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/new-calif...
You will need to deal with the gaps and it's not trivial, but if you are already putting huge panels, would it not be easier to route rain/snow/ice from the gaps, than to build a separate rain/snow proof layer with a bunch of mounting holes?
It shouldn't be hard to add some overlapping flaps to the panel (during manufature), and roofs with tiles like these [1][2], only use around 5cm of overlap, so 10-15cm might be sufficient and simple for a big solar panel.
[1] https://www.diyhowto.com.au/guide/how-to-clean-terracotta-ro... [2] https://www.recycledbuildingcentre.com.au/terracotta-roof-ti...
Do you have references to any solutions, other Tesla's popular, pretty and expensive version?
A flush panel-only roof seems more aesthetic than shingles + raised solar, and would be good-enough for me.
Comparable, but that's not the right comparison. It's between a roof and buying your power from the power company and roof+solar. The first is way cheaper.
If we want to be green than still, a roof + 1,000 sq feet of solar out in the country connected to your house by wires is way cheaper.
Tesla offers that, but it's not cheap.[1]
[1] https://electrek.co/2019/06/14/tesla-solar-roof-quote-price/
Very pretty, but seems like a fire waiting to happen, or at least a regular failure. Also seems expensive financially and materially with all those individual connectors and cables.
I was thinking of something a bit more brutalist-fashion, with the roof designed for standard 1-2 m² panels, and a small dose of non-solar same-color panels for any chimneys, corners or other unavoided irregularities. Not small shingles to fit any roof.
I would like to see terrace materials with mediocre efficiency solar collection, similar to the solar streets idea, but dealing with a realistic amount of wear and tear.
If they did, they couldn’t make these bold statements anymore.
Now the FUD has switched to "you're not taking into account the cost of backup fossil fuels." Well turns out that coal is being shut down everywhere, because it can't even compete. We don't need them. There's a chance that we might need natural gas a few weeks a year in 2040. The statement should be "how are natural gas plants going to shift payment schemes so they can survive in this world," not "you're not taking into account the cost."
We have storage alternatives that will make natural gas obsolete at the next spike in fuel prices. Storage deploys quick. The fossil fuel guys had better get their lobbying straight if they want a piece of the pie in 15 years, or they will be engineered around.
Because of natural gas. The growth of natural gas almost entirely offsets the coal shutdown.
We have barely doubled the electricity generated by renewables in the US since the 90s: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-... And hydro makes up a 1/3 of it, wind makes slightly more than hydro, and solar is nearly a drop in the bucket.
https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/
PJM and ERCOT interconnection queues are seeing big drops in natural gas, replaced with renewables (and storage).
Counting hydro as renewables, when it has been a large and unchanging source of energy for decades upon decades, is just a tactic to obscure the exponential growth in renewables. A clever way to try to snow investors or shareholders that don't want to admit to bad investments, but not a good way to understand where the market is actually going.
The PJM and ERCOT markets, where any independent operator can interconnect and start trying to make money, are in stark contrast to a lot regulated utilities in the US. Under the regulated utility model, the utility tries to maximize profits under the constraints of what the regulator will let them get away with, and what the regulator will let the utility bill to the customer. Often, the regulator's rules tend to make the utility want to build lots of transmission, because that's a guaranteed 20% profit. Whereas if the utility adds lots of cheaper new generation, they are at risk of putting old assets out of business, which means lost capital investments.
So when we want to find out what the true costs of electricity are, we should look to where investors are putting their money in PJM and ERCOT, and ignore anybody who works for a regulated utility. The motives are completely different.
Solar and wind are unreliables and can't actually be used consistently which means that you need to not just factor in the cost of the backup energy but also to take into account that solar and wind are parasitic forms of energy and thus drives up the cost of other forms because they are politically preferred through among other things wind tax credits.
So I don't believe that you are actually describing anything close to the true cost until you start doing something like the above.
I said, the cost to generate electricity when asked to, i.e. whatever is needed to make the grid function. I talked about capacity markets, the guarantees against "parasitism."
Therefore, the cost is actually reflected in the functioning of the grid.
The idea of "parasitic" energy sources is preposterous. If they can't be relied upon, then during those unreliable moments the fuel-based generators can make all their profits.
If it were actually somehow cheaper to keep these fossil-based plants in force, point out the market failure to us. We have two entirely different market structures, energy-only in ERCOT, and energy+capacity in PJM, and they are both coalescing away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and storage.
Your arguments are years out of date. Everybody knows that fossil fuels have limited lifespan on the grid, the only question is how much they can manipulate market regulations to keep them going for a few more years. Exxon is already paying heavily for their foolishness in overinvesting in assets that were clearly stranded at the time of purchase. How many more years of taking out loans to pay dividends can these companies endure?
No the cost is not reflected in the functioning of the grid, quite the contrary.
Wind and solar makes the system more complex AND because it's politically preferred and incentivized through ex. wind tax credits it ends up making the other forms more expensive because they have to give room for wind and solar WHEN they have capacity which obviously makes fossil fuel more expensive.
Wind and solar is the affirmative action of the energy system and they deliver a small fraction of the actual energy needed to run a modern society.
But hey, keep drinking the kool-aid.
I’m tired of this claim.
It’s cheaper when you ignore the necessary backup power plants, yes.
That’s not a real-world system though and Germany’s electricity prices disagree with you.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
Stored solar, no subsidies: $81-$140/MWh
Coal: $65-$159/MWh
And then with solar, 40%-70% of consumption will be direct without storage, at $29-$42/MWh, which pulls the all-in cost of solar way below coal.
And that's for projects deployed in 2020. Wait 5 years, the typical timeline for bidding and installation for utilities, and any utility that isnt planning for massive renewables and storage is simply bilking their customers.
Germany was built a decade ago. Using it as a point of reference is deceptive.
For current chemistries, cobalt is more of a concern, but that's mostly a concern for car batteries, and the concern is more about the terrible conditions of extraction (some child labor from small scale mining) than the total amount.
For stationary storage, sodium behaves a lot like lithium, but is far heavier. And there are all sorts of flow chemistries that have barely been examined.
However I think the lithium train has left the station, unless there's some sort of serious market interference to cause huge unexpected shortages, there's little chance for lithium competitors to catch up within the next 15 years.
Lazard has not revealed the full details of their methodology, but there are deployments with storage all the time, they tend just not to get any press unless Tesla is involved. And until FERC's recent order 841, it was pretty much impossible to even connect storage on most grids.
Here's a summary of hybrid projects (generation plus storage) as of last year (page 6):
https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/Panel-1-Gor...
Most new renewables deployments in the US will contain storage of some sort in the future.
The plant they list has 100 MW of solar, 50 MW/200 MWh of storage.
Assuming a CF of 0.3 that makes it 720 MWh per day, 73% of it not touching the battery.
If you built a plant that only supplies power at night it would be way more expensive.
It's not yet cheaper than coal if you wanted to run the whole grid on PV + batteries, not close. You need a lot more than 2 hours of nameplate capacity storage per plant.
But as you say, the costs are rapidly falling. The coming EV transition will provide significant economies of scale.
And this is also valuing carbon at $0, which is a horrendous distortion.
The project is cheaper than wholesale arbitrage because they don't have to pay wholesale prices to charge the battery, inverters are used for multiple purposes, and most PV solar designs already throw away some electricity, so that's free.
Also on that page, doing some napkin math on the project lifetime MWh of 1,260,000, and the purchase price of $600-$1000/kWh is higher than most grid batteries deployed these days. These are very conservative numbers!
Lazard's numbers are difficult to compare to most actual storage payment contracts, because every one I've seen is structured around paying for capacity, in kW-months, rather than straight payments for every MWh of energy dumped on the grid. But the capacity payments end up working out to numbers that are on the low end of Lazard's cost estimates when translated.
If we use the ratio of the plant (i.e. 200 MWh storage for 720 MWh generation at a 30% capacity factor), that would leave us with (81-140 * 0.27) + 29-38 for the generation, for a total cost of $51-76/MWh.
But that's still based around the idea of cycling the storage daily. Solar performs poorly on cloudy days, so you can either overbuild it significantly, build days of storage instead of hours, or keep the old power plants around as backup. Either of the three is going to bump up that cost significantly.
It blows coal out of the water if you don't have to worry about days you're not producing power, but you can't build a grid around that. And coal is mostly being eaten by natural gas for price reasons anyway.
Did you factor in a discount rate with your back of the napkin math? It might explain why the purchase price looks so high.
Germany's electricity prices are high because theyve front loaded capex and are decommissioning old power plants early.
It gets even more ridiculous when the nuclear lobby roll it out because if they were going to go on a nuke plant building binge like France did in the 80s their electricity prices would be even higher.
They could get a bit more imaginative and standardized. Intelligent panels with integrated micro invertors that you just had to feed a cable into the fuse box and you're done would be nice. Standards so my water heater could talk to the panels and know when to turn on would be nice too.
the "standards" part I agree with - it irks me that despite the fact that my solar edge inverter could theoretically constantly be babbling to the network about the state of things, the protocol is entirely proprietary (and I refuse to connect it to the internet anyway).
Don't understand this comment given that Enphase is a grid-tied micro-inverter.
My Solar Edge system uses micro-inverters on each panel, but still has "an inverter" before the grid interconnect.
What I'm personally waiting for is a grid-tied inverter that can also be used to directly charge batteries as well. Nobody seems to make one that doesn't involve some important compromises. For now it seems that if you want grid-tied and a battery system, you charge the batteries through a double DC->AC->DC conversion (i.e. charge the batteries from your regular house AC system), and somehow solve the instant-cutover problem separately.
I'd guess 8% MINIMUM for another five years. Really is quite the blocker for any new nuclear / hydrogen / biofuel / natural gas planning aside from load levelling.
Is BYD any cheaper / better than LFP?
To gp's objection, multilayer cells (possibly silicon-perovskite, possibly others) reduce installation cost and real estate cost. Double the power per unit area, halve the installation and land requirement.
Other overhead costs like design and regulatory approval can be reduced with standardization.
Costs can't continue going down indefinitely, but I agree that we are not near a floor. I'd expect another 20 years of gradually tapering reductions. As you say, not good for any kind of thermal generation, with its attendant high operation and maintenance costs. It also makes fusion power generation research pointless.
I still think we should research it long-term...
But (HOT TAKE) redirecting any large scale funding to hydrogen, nuclear, geothermal, or hydro in the next ten years is just slowing down progress on global warming when we are, by all accounts, in a VERY critical time for mitigating the worst case.
Rooftop solar and consumer batteries does require consumers to have access to capital, though.
It's easy to forget (especially if you make $$$$$ in tech) that many people just aren't in great shape financially. Even if rooftop solar pays off in the end, they may not have the cash sitting around, may not be able to qualify for a loan, or may have other more urgent needs (car loan, etc.).
Plenty of people will understand the payoff and will be able to push themselves over the hump to reach a more optimized state. But there will probably always be lots of people who can't and will buy electricity instead.
Worse government sitting on a pile of old coal plants has a financial incentive to not lose their well off customers. It's the only part of their customer base that _can_ pay.
A consequence of this is that as people with the capital (and accountants advising them) opt out of the grid, the burden of grid maintenance will fall increasingly on people who can't get access to the capital (or are short-term in their housing).
So poor people will end up paying far more for their electricity than affluent people.
Have a look at Calfifornia where a lot of gas plants have to provide electricity when the sun is down.
It’s sometimes really bizarre how proponents of renewables completely ignore the low capacity factor of their proposed technology or claim that large-capacity storage is a trivial problem to solve.
There is a reason why Germany has the second-highest electricity prices worldwide and why California had rolling blackouts not so long ago.
If anything, the cause of the most recent real estate crash (and subsequent rise) was the overwhelming covariance of real estate trends throughout the country/developed world.
edit-Here's a potential factor to make energy local - but just a supposition: A desire for power to be generated at smaller, localized scales. i.e. Power becomes near-free through the use of tiny nuclear plants - so tiny even your most stalwart against it perceives it as safe enough at that tiny scale.
It's already not particularly unreasonable for many residential users in California to generate all that they consume on-site with solar and a backup gasoline generator to refill the batteries during winter bad weather... the main cost in doing so is the batteries and people are continuing to predict decreases in battery costs.
Long term, solar/battery economics will eventually make the cost of maintaining the grid too expensive. Governments will try and mandate against it, but that will only last so long.
Batteries, pumped storage, conventional power stations, things that benefit hugely from scale.
Even if solar was free, the sun still goes down, the clouds still come out.
No, it sounds like the intro to a lawsuit. (Although I'm surprised because I thought a cell phone could effectively run purely on solar power if you get any decent sunlight)
Instead, large battery banks have some scale costs too. Cooling is a large one.
There is a reason why California and Germany have so many gas power plants or are building new (17 new plants being built in Germany at the moment).
My understanding of the FCAS market is that it is quite shallow, and while there is indeed a first mover advantage that Hornsdale (Tesla battery in SA) has capitalised on, if all the other battery projects in Australia go ahead, they'll probably collapse the price.
I've watched some videos on Mongolia recently, they use solar panels in yurts in literally the middle of nowhere to charge batteries and watch satellite TV, which is amazing imo.
If they can do it, so can we. Individual power generation for every house.
(2) the level of battery usage this would imply has tremendous, mostly negative implications. A large chunk of contemporary batteries is just packaging (i.e. does not contribute to energy storage), and this would replicated across every house. While more easily recycled (in theory) than PV, we're still talking about a gigantic increase in highly distributed tricky-to-recycle material. That doesn't even get to the resources required to store sufficient energy for contemporary western/US lifestyles when solar or wind is unavailable.
p.s. I live in a net-zero-PV-powered house, grid tied.
meh if they lose 20% of their production after 25 years.
Someone without a Homeowners' Association will put them on lumber Toblerones all across their yard and happily use them for another several decades. When do they hit 33% or less efficiency? That's when you shred them up, recover the metals and grind them into dust for concrete. They're mostly sand products anyway.
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2017/10/the-opportunities-...
The most difficult problem right now seems to be that the value of the recovered materials is less than the cost of recycling the panels.
After what percentage of deficiency does solar become unviable? I’ll gladly take panels off anyone’s hands that have lost 75% of their efficiency and hodge-podge something together. If we lose 20% after 25 years, when do we lose 75%+?
[0]: https://www.mrappliance.com/expert-tips/appliance-life-guide...
[1]: https://www.bobvila.com/articles/how-long-does-a-roof-last/
Slate varies depending on the region it comes from - Pennsylvania slate tends to suffer badly from freeze/thaw action, but some from New England can match the 200 year lifetime associated with Welsh slate. Similarly for stone.
It is absolutely the case that these materials are not widely used in US construction. But they have lifetimes that more closely match the expected life of even a moderately well-built stud frame house.
Metal roofing is rapidly gaining ground in some parts of the USA, and has a theoretical lifetime even beyond tile or slate. Unfortunately poor initial installs in many cases shortens the real-world life to something closer to high-end asphalt shingles.
The appliance/panel comparison strikes me as apt in some ways, but not in others. While removing/replacing roof-mounted solar might be approaching ease of replacement that is in the same ballpark as a typical stove, refridgerator, washing machine, water heater or furnace, it is necessarily more laborious and more dangerous work, and involves a component that to all effects and purposes is totally passive.
I wasn't commenting on the payoff time, but on the notion that we should be installing this relatively short-lived equipment everywhere we possibly can.
Weather is a huge variable. In summer my solar panels may generate all the power needs for my off-grid boat. In winter, I rely on the engine alternator and turning my fridge off.
That is because transport (cable) loss is a function of the current squared, while the transported power (energy) is a function of both current and voltage.
Of course most appliances that want DC usually do so at a lower voltage (typically 5-24V), hence why they often go hand in hand.
There's just too much momentum behind AC circuits, and with modern electronics you can do AC->DC and vice versa quite efficiently. Additionally, AC has some nice benefits, like having safer/simpler plugs and switches due to minimized arcing.
https://youtu.be/bveGhdtlFn0?t=169
Edit: re-watching that, the economics doesn't sound great.
Edit 2: a more in depth video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBCbdThIJNE&t=81s
It's no short-term thing, but it's the kind of thing that I might get to see in my lifetime. And it's certainly something that should get engineers excited, even if it's just considering what's theoretically possible.
Also, as the 2nd video notes, though it does send more heat through to earth, it's trivial in comparison to greenhouse effects, which are the kind of things this could mitigate, not just by cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions, but by providing enough cheap energy to make carbon capture feasible.
[1] https://www.inverse.com/article/60712-spacex-starship-elon-m... [2] https://www.spectrolab.com/DataSheets/Panel/panels.pdf [3] https://modernize.com/solar/panel-cost-calculator#:~:text=So....
Edit: 500 days. Don't trust me with math.
While I don't think using the energy on earth is a good idea I'm sure it would work out for space based manufacturing. If you can send the silicon modules to space and manufacture the rest onsite you could probably make it economical.