GURPS O'Neill Cylinder Design

[AlexanderHowl]

The primary economic advantage of SPS is you need a 1/5th as much solar gathering capacity, plus you do not need the storage capacity for 4x the hourly production as on the surface. In essence, 50% of the time is night and, for the day, you average 50% production, as solar intensities waxes and wanes throughout the day, plus you have cloud cover and storage inefficiencies, meaning that a nation like the USA would need 140,000 square kilometers of solar panels and 80 million metric tons of lithium ion batteries. Since the materials for lithium ion batteries cost $7,500 per metric ton, the material costs alone for the batteries would be over $600 billion, and that it before prices increase due to increased demand.