I think one of these space mirror companies was actually proposing using these as a way to maximise solar farms by having a little bit more light just before sunrise or just after sunset. A back of the envelope calculations showed that in perfect conditions they would hit about 0.0001% of the amount of power required for the solar panels to start working. It would also be at best for like 20 mins a day. And to top it off, it won’t work if it’s cloudy, foggy etc. all the conditions solar usually struggles with.
So where I live it gets dark and cloudy somewhere around end of September and we don’t see any light till maybe early March. This is the time where it is cold AF outside and we need maximum energy for heating our homes. So it is at this time energy is most expensive and cheap solar would really help. But since there is no sun (hence the cold AF part), there is also no solar (hence the expensive energy part). At other times in the year we already get loads of cheap energy from solar and we can easily store up enough to get through the night, so in that time something like 20 mins of extra solar would do basically jack shit. This means getting any money from this would be really hard, who is willing to pay for that little bit of energy, which is only available at times when energy is already cheap.
So it’s broken on both a physics side and also on an economic side. Plus you know the gigantic amounts of downsides. But I think somehow a startup with this idea got like millions of dollars for no reason at all.
Maybe a better solution in your case is geothermal (digging a hole in the ground and use the heat of the ground, many meters below surface, to heat water and use it to power a turbine or to heat up the house).
Yeah that would be good, but unfortunately not feasible where I live. It’s all bog and sand around here, with underground water layers that are illegal to disturb. Due to the state of the world, our water is getting to be scarce and as a response against that all the water in the ground has been placed under special protection. The layers of sand also shift around a lot, making underground structures unstable.
What would have been really good is more nuclear power, something that can provide a solid backbone during times when natural sources like solar and wind aren’t reliable or present at all. But it’s a little late for that now. As we move away from fossile fuels, the power grid gets loaded heavily which increases costs and causes power outages. At the same time we become more reliant on solar and wind, which also overloads the grid in summer as there is too much and then drops out in winter, as there is no sun and the wind is often very gusty and goes between no wind and high winds all the time. With the increased load of AI, costs for water and power will rise and instability will increase. There’s more going on, but in the end it’s just a very shitty situation.
This is what machine learning is useful for. Not to try to convince you that oranges are active and potatoes are passive, or to give you a thumbs up with 7~8 fingers. But to detect patterns and allow automation of repetitive tasks.
There are certain aspects of it that look more complicated than they are because you are seeing it as a representation on a flat map. It makes a lot more sense when you see it on a globe with all the pieces moving in 3d space.
It is complicated because there are tilts to the earths rotation and a tilt to the moon’s orbit, but people thousands of years ago figured it out, so it’s solvable.
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