I’m sorry, buddy. It’s real.

https://xcancel.com/ENERGY/status/2080310429159444583

Seems like the official DoE account on LinkedIn posted it;

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy_customers-of-the-largest-us-regional-power-activity-7486076083239333888-CfN9

Kinda looks like a sunrise 🌅

Moonlight and starlight is indirect and distant solar power, respectively.

China is basically the only major economy that invested into making a transition off fossil fuels actually possible.

The lack of morality is a feature.

Moonlight

Best guess, sunset is being defined as a specific time. Sunset isn't necessarily the point at which all sunlight is gone, and even then, the time the sun goes down varies depending on where you are within a given time zone. If they just used an arbitrary time or an almanac listing for twilight for each day, they could easily end up including slivers of daylight in their post sunset data.

Which is really pointless since this is just the same old "BuT sOlAr DoEsN't WoRk At NiGhT" argument that idiots have been making for decades. But I suppose you gotta at least pretend to use real world data to make it look sciencey.

That's from a private religious education textbook. It is not representative of the U.S. education system.

If you kill all the Nazis this will stop being a problem.

I know you aren't serious, but I am now curious how much night time solar relaying it would take to pay off launching one of those satellites. I need to find numbers...

Edit- Here it is- with updated math

Looking around I first needed to see how much energy generation nets. This is time and location dependant. I am in Texas. Out grid is run by ERCOT and they have their wholesale grid prices listed.

If I were to be buying reflected solar, it would obviously be at night, during the unfortunately lower priced off peak times. Looking at the grid avg we get about $40 per MWh.

But we now have the question of how big is the solar farm? And this size is now limited to the reflected beam size. According to reflect orbital their first satellite, Eärendil-1, has a beam diameter of approximately 5 square Km. But we have to factor in some beam dissipation near the edges, so let's be safe and call it a circle with a diameter of 4 square Km of usable reflected solar. This number also easily convers to about 1000 acres of land.

Utility Scale solar farms output 1 MW per 5-10 acres. Of we took the middle (7.5 acres per MW) our hypothetical reflected beam sized solar farm would output 150 MW.

At $40 per MW and 150 MW we are generating $6000 per hour. And with our twilight window of 6 hours we can generate $36,000 per night.

But how much does the satellite cost? The rented cost is one thing, but only peasants rent the sun. We are talking about owning it. The satellite is Reported to cost $2 million. But the mass produced they are claiming will cost closer to $300k. Let's pretend this becomes a viable buisness strategy to own these satellites and beam them to a reflected solar farm and use the $300k.

So our cheap satellite should take about 8.3 nights to pay off. The expensive one should take about 55.5 nights to pay off.

This also does not factor in lower luminosity, night time clouds, solar build cost, or launch cost. This is also factoring in today's energy prices that continue to trend downward with the adoption of more renewables. This also ignores the giant issue of their orbital height only giving 4 minutes of sun per pass per satellite. I don't even want to know how many centuries it would then take to pay off a $2 million satellite in 4 minute increments...