You also don't usually use the same exact kind of panels as terrestrial solar farms. Since you are going to space, you spend the extra money to get the highest possible efficiency in terms of W/kg. Terrestrial usually optimizes for W/$ nameplate capacity LCOE, which also includes installation and other costs.
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.
It’s still not even remotely reasonable, but it’s definitely much higher in space.
https://wiki.pvmet.org/index.php?title=Standard_Test_Conditi...
So, a "400W panel" is rated to produce 400W at standard testing conditions.
I'm not sure how relevant that is to the numbers being thrown around in this thread, but thought I'd provide context.
>just use even more solar panels
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.
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.
Humanity has a finite (and too small) capacity for building solar panels. AI requires lots of power already. So the question is, do you want AI to consume X (where X is a pretty big chunk of the pie), or five times X, from that total supply?
Using less PV is great, but only if the total cost ends up cheaper than installing 5X the capacity as terrestrial PV farms, along with daily smoothing batteries.
SpaceX is only skating to where they predict the cost puck will be.
STC uses an irradiance of irradiance 1000W/m2, in space it seems like you get closer to 1400W/m2. That's definitely better, but also not enormously better.
Seems also like they are rated at 25C, I am certainly not a space engineer but that seems kind of temperate for space where cooling is more of a challenge.
Seems like it might balance out to more like 1.1x to 1.3x more power in space?
or would you prefer them to go to the bathroom upstairs?
at some point big tech is in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation...
It's probably not competitive at all without having fully reusable launch rockets, so the cost to LEO is a lot lower.
That's why people are trying to build solar here. Our power is expensive due partially to failing to build basically any new generation, and some land is very cheap, and the operational cost of a solar farm is minuscule.
Solar farming is basically an idle game in real life and my addiction is making me itchy.
You can overprovision, and you should with how stupidly cheap solar is.
That we aren't spending billions of Federal dollars building solar anywhere we can, as much as we can, is pathetic and stupid and a national tragedy.
We got so excited about dam building that there's no where to build useful dams anymore, and there is significant value to be gained by removing those dams, yet somehow we aren't deploying as much solar as we possibly can?
It's a national security issue. China knows this, and is building appropriately.
The southwest should be generating so much solar power that we sequester carbon from the atmosphere simply because there is nothing else left to do with the power.
But those two parameters are not equals: 3x the cost per kg is a much higher number then 4x the solar power.