Also, smelting aluminium takes a lot of power. The Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter [1] uses 13% of New Zealand's electricity to separate the aluminium and oxygen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium_Smelter
Circumference of the moon: 10,921km
Longest power transmission line: 2,543km (Belo Monte-Rio de Janeiro transmission line, Brazil)
So it sounds quite feasible actually
But even more so near the poles, where there's no need to build transmission lines around the entire circumference to access constant sunlight. Prime real estate for moonbases!
What if the moon was just a mining and energy "moon" how amusing would that be.
Without atmosphere, you just point the panel to the sun and you'll get 100% power again regardless of how low the Sun is over the horizon.
Because ... microasteroids and co.
The missing atmosphere that gives you more light also do not protect you against countless small projectiles.
But when space is not a problem: I would just use solar foil. Not as efficient per square meter, but can cover much more area with a given volume and weight freight restraint.
They'll hit you all the same regardless of your movements. A very simple mechanical system that does a full rotation every 28 days would suffice.
If you don't need to import the solar foil from Earth, it becomes a much better alternative. Low maintenance means nobody needs to visit the surface to fix stuff.
Contrast that the asteroid materials/free space situation where the solar collector is made from a polymer film coated with thin films of metals and/or semiconductors to either reflect and concentrate or convert energy.
The title of that article suggests that oxygen is limiting but really you need 4 parts N2, Helium, SF6, or some other inert for one part of O2 if you don’t want everything to burn up. Those large airspaces in the O’Neill colonies are unrealistic for that reason.
H2O is limiting in terrestrial ecosystems and that is true in the rest of the universe. Part of the resolution of the Fermi ‘paradox’ is that most of the life in the universe is outside the frost line where a significant part of most bodies is water. Liquid water is generic in outer solar system bodies and probably some interstellar bodies where it takes tremendous luck for dry inner solar system bodies to have a thin sheen on the surface like we do.
I can picture a ‘Galileo’ on a slightly less cooked Io or more cooked Europa getting hassled by the church about the significance of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘Don’t you know life would be impossible without high levels of radiation?’
Consider a relatively modest 1km square patch of such a massive array. At the equator this patch will consist of panels laid out flat horizontally relative to the 'ground', with a 10m patch spaced every 10m (no gap). At 80 degrees latitude this patch will consist of panels angled up at 80 degrees in longitudinal strips. Let's say each panel is a square 10m x 10m. If the next strip towards the equator is placed 10m away from the foot of the strip 'behind' it, almost all of the strip behind will be obscured in it's shadow. In fact the strips would need to be spaced about every 60m instead of every 10m. That's 1/7th the density. Instead of 1 sq km of panel area you'd only have 0.14 sq km of panels.
It’s true that there are still short periods of darkness even at the poles, but they’re not months long like on Earth.
Further, you could still access 24 hour sunlight by building a transmission grid with multiple solar panels, but the length of the transmission lines required would be much shorter near the poles.
Of course this means seriously low temperatures as in below negative 150 range. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/moonpole.html
You get similarly extreme cold temperatures (-180C or so) anywhere on the moon during darkness, even at the equator.
There are some advantages to those temperatures being so consistent, but a compromise location is probably the better alternative.
D-He3 is the lowest temperature aneutronic fusion reaction. Not all fast neutron hardening problems go away because a small cross section of reactions will be D-D even at the higher temperature (and potentially short bursts of higher fast neutron flux if temperature control is inadequate and low). However, most of the energy comes out as fast charged particles, which is open to direct conversion. Ditching the steam cycle is a big deal in terms of plant size and weight.
The day night cycle is almost a month long which means you need extreme energy storage, but daytime temperatures go from colder than the arctic winter to past the boiling point of water. The poles don’t get as hot, but they also get months long night due to the moons axial tilt.
But no matter how you slice it, that two weeks of darkness is a problem. You're going to need nuclear power up there. Fortunately, most of the objections to it on Earth don't apply up there. Space is already a radioactive hell scape in general, there's nothing alive to kill, there's no (currently-known) mechanisms for waste to propagate anywhere you didn't originally put it, etc. etc. We know we can build fission reactors small enough to put out reasonable amounts of power and fit into a payload of a rocket, since we have vessels powered by them already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#High-temp...
Don't they already handle these extremes in satellite solar panels?
That is a very good question, because larger panels would mean more mass and cost more.
So careful balancing of the factors? or a different panel formula?
The notion of temperature is quite weird on the Moon. There's no air over there, and temperature does not make sense in a vacuum. Or rather, there's some type of temperature, but it does not affect the solar panels, simply because the solar panels of countless satellites work just fine.
One could say that the 110C refers to the temperature of the regolith. But that's only if the regolith is directly exposed to the sun, which obviously will not be the case for the regolith underneath the solar panels. And even if it were the case, you can make the supports of the solar panels to be thermally insulating, and again, since there's no air, there won't be any way for the heat to travel from the regolith to the panels.
That said, there are options simply being further from the equator directly translates to lower daytime temperatures, but that also means lower subsurface temperatures. Really the point isn’t it’s impossible to use solar on the moon, just significantly more difficult than on a satellite.