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[–] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

"GW per year" and "TW per year" is nonsense.
Watts is a unit of power, which is energy per second.
Im not sure Musk even understands what a Watt is, he just wants to sound smart.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's watts multiplied by time, aka energy.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    As much as I'd like to shit on him, I believe he talks about building energy generation capacity (aka GW or TW) in a certain time period (i.e. one year). Like building 1000 100MW power stations every year, but in space.

    Can't tell if it makes any sense economically though, getting anything in scale to space is still kinda very expensive.

    And if you try to make whatever you need to get to space light, compact and efficient, it usually quickly becomes very expensive itself.

    So "solve other parts of equation" probably means "give me money".

    Later edit: if you ever played Factorio, this is equivalent of amount of solar panels crafted and delivered to space platform per hour.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Watt is an Energy unit, period, as electrical unit, as in this case, it's W=VA(δ), only as work/kinetic unit it's W = J/s = Nm/s = kgm²*s^-^³

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