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In sci.physics Alain Fournier wrote:
Le Oct/17/2016 ? 1:28 AM, a ?crit :
In sci.physics Alain Fournier wrote:

snip

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.

Alain Fournier

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.

Alain Fournier

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.

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.

You also need a copper mine and mill to produce the sheet copper.

You will not have any of those things until you have installed the
very large amount of generating capacity it takes to run them.

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.

--
Jim Pennino