In every game of Factorio I've played I didn't realize just how many solar panels I'd needed until I was hitting my power limits and in desperate need of more. The problem being that manufacturing these takes... power.
Yes but... In Factorio, the only cost is the original manufacturing costs. The same goes for storage. Once manufactured and placed, they will produce power forever as long as it is daylight. The capacitors will also last forever. There are no weather patterns to mess up production.
In other words, once you make one, you have a permanent power increase. Your power can grow exponentially if you just focus on building and placing panels. That makes them the absolute best power source in the game. Not the most compact, though. But that doesn't matter since the map is infinite and there are no transmission losses.
Reality is not as forgiving. We'll need more panels. Way more :) Even more if we start doing things like fuel synthesis. But we should.
I has always bugged me that we use dirty power during summer to... power ACs! We have all this extra energy literally falling from the sky. Which is the whole reason why we want to get rid of it. Air conditioning doesn't actually require that much power to run with proper insulation. People have been able to power large RV air conditioning with solar alone.
I'm currently keeping half of a quite large (and horribly leaky) house perfectly pleasant with a midsized solar array, a portable air conditioner, and a fan. Zero grid draw.
We have the power already! In California we currently enjoy the phenomenon of “curtailment” where we can’t use solar power when and where it is produced, so we just disconnect solar panels from the grid. This usually happens in the spring when sun is plentiful and demand is low. If crystalline PV production was collocated with seasonally-curtailed solar power plants, you have a runaway virtuous cycle of zero-carbon energy production.
Of course, you’d have to subsidize it because basic economics won’t make it work.
tbh i just skip solar panels. it's such a grind. by the time i can make them at scale, i need so many of them, and i hate placing them. even with pretty OP construction bots it's not worth the effort IMO.
this might be mitigated if you tile something that can self expand, but even then you'll have to AFK or just have this going on for hours while you don't have access to the power you're trying to generated.
i end up scaling coal as far as i can and then rushing nuclear. nuclear is also a grind but at least you have to place them less frequently.
Solar power in Factorio pairs really well with spidertron. You can give it a bunch of bots, and an automated production line and it just builds itself. The only hard part is to make sure to always keep power growing rather than only expanding when you need more power.
Real life will probably move on from panels, too. PV will be made on big rolls of plastic film (like mylar or kapton), laid out on the ground. Think 3 meters wide by a kilometre long.
