XPost: sci.space.policy, sci.physics
From: fjmccall@gmail.com
jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com wrote:
>In sci.physics Alain Fournier wrote:
>> Le Oct/17/2016 ? 1:28 AM, jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com a ?crit :
>>> In sci.physics Alain Fournier wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> You don't need lots of water and a clean room to make solar panels. You
>>>> need those to make high performance solar panel. If you manufacture your
>>>> own panels on Mars, you would probably go for easy to do low efficiency
>>>> panels at first. On Earth, people are willing to pay a little more in
>>>> order to have 10 m^2 of panels instead of 500 m^2 of panels. But on
>>>> Mars, the neighbours are far away and you can use lots of surface area.
>>>>
>>>
>>> As high efficiency solar panel on Mars would only deliver a daily average
>>> of about 40 W/m^2, low efficieny panels means a LOT of panels.
>>>
>>> Making solar panel silicon is very energy intensive, so how do you
>>> bootstrap a solar panel plant other than with a reactor or shipping
>>> huge amounts of panels, mounting hardware, and cement for the posts?
>>
>> Low efficiency solar panels don't need "solar panel silicon". I saw a
>> guy who was making solar panels in his basement. He had some kind of
>> paste he made and he would basically paint his paste on, if I recall
>> correctly, sheets of copper, then put a wire on the copper side and
>> another wire on his pained side. That's all, it worked, not very
>> efficiently but it worked. His panels had only about 30% the efficiency
>> of commercial panels, but they were cheap.
>>
>
>40 W/m^2 is based on reasonably efficient solar panels. 30% of that means
>you get 12 W/m^2. That means you need 84,000 square meters of panel to
>generate 1 MW.
>
So about a 300 meter square, then. And note that Alan is talking
about cells someone made in their basement. It won't be hard for a
real foundry to do better than that.
>
>Increasing the required area increases the number of support structures
>you have to build and concrete into the ground.
>
>You need a steel or aluminum mill and mines to provide the raw stock to
>build the support structures and a cement plant to install them.
>
There are other ways to do it. Concrete is easy.
>
>You also need a copper mine and mill to produce the sheet copper.
>
Copper could potentially be a problem, as we haven't found any
concentrated copper deposits yet, but we have examined very little of
the Martian surface.
>
>You will not have any of those things until you have installed the
>very large amount of generating capacity it takes to run them.
>
For some moderate value of 'very large'. When did Earth humans start
using copper and how much installed power capacity did they have at
the sites where they used it? Both the copper age and the iron age
occurred before humans even started keeping records. Earth humans
made steel before the birth of Christ.
Yes, wholesale production of large pieces is harder, but you talk like
this is an insurmountable barrier and it quite obviously is not.
>
>It would appear to me it would be far cheaper and easier to ship high
>efficiency stuff from earth until you have the power to build your
>own high efficiency panels and mounting structures.
>
Actually, it's probably cheaper initially to use nuclear power. DOE
has designed small (suitcase sized) reactors that would provide around
40 kW each. They're going to build the first one for testing next
year. Want a 160 kW nuke plant? It's the size of four suitcases.
--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw
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