Re:Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar ...
by BeefWellington on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @12:30AM
(#34800448)
> The bigger problem is how practical is it to use PV at all on much of the moon.
A tactic I've used in Dyson Sphere Program is to build an equatorial belt around the entire moon so that some % of panels are always in sunlight. On our actual moon that would be approximately 7.2m panels, assuming they were a single tightly packed row of 5' x 3' panels.
This sounds like an insane amount but several of the largest solar installations on Earth each have more than that, with Bhadla Solar Park in India having over 10 million[1]. It's a dumb solution but is one which requires no shipment of energy storage. If you're able to mass manufacture panels in-situ, it may be simpler to do something like that than to ship large batteries to the Moon in order to use them as storage.
A tactic I've used in Dyson Sphere Program is to build an equatorial belt around the entire moon so that some % of panels are always in sunlight. On our actual moon that would be approximately 7.2m panels, assuming they were a single tightly packed row of 5' x 3' panels.
This sounds like an insane amount but several of the largest solar installations on Earth each have more than that, with Bhadla Solar Park in India having over 10 million[1]. It's a dumb solution but is one which requires no shipment of energy storage. If you're able to mass manufacture panels in-situ, it may be simpler to do something like that than to ship large batteries to the Moon in order to use them as storage.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/3/india-solar-rene...