I was thinking the same thing as Cyparagon. I do believe photovoltaics are a bit more effecient than that arent they? not much though. yeah, next we'll get started on a dyson sphere and before you know it we'll be a type II civilization. (Kardashev scale)
There are some research-lab cells that are 44% efficient, but commercial cells top off at 19%. They were pretty happy when they even got close to 15%. Most are a bit lower than that, some as crappy as 6% (like those garden lights), and they degrade over time too.
<begin rant>
That proposal in the news article is just plain idiotic. The moon could be a
giant polished mirror and it will only reflect to Earth less than what the sun already shines
directly to earth. The energy problem on Earth has
never been about the amount of solar energy we have access to (12.2 trillion watt-hours/yr), but efficient means to harvest and convert that to something useful.
So why bother with with the moon at all? What does it have that we could not just do on Earth? Sure we have an atmosphere, but even that doesn't really matter if you're going to produce something huge. We have the whole Pacific Ocean if we really needed some empty space. We could set up solar lilypads out there instead of on some moon. Let the robots build stuff using Earth's bountiful silicon instead of on some moon.
Or why even bother with solar at all? The Japanese should be spending their time making molten salt nuclear reactors that can't even melt down, put out tons of power, recycle their own fuel, and could even be exported to places like Iran because the fuel is so export safe.
Regardless, I don't think we should be doing
anything out in space besides sending
probes out for exploration, or the regular batch of satellites we put up around earth, until we have a space elevator. We should get rid of that waste-of-money ISS, get rid of these stupid notions of moon bases and Mars bases, and start concentrating on the only rock we'll ever really call home: the Earth, or at least that space elevator.
Other than mineral mining, which is tenuous at best, there's really not much reason to be bothering with stuff off this planet anyway except just to explore it -- with probes. No place out there that we can ever reach in humanity's lifetime will ever even approximate even some of the
least habitable places on Earth. Want to go to Mars? Enjoy your radiation-laden trip, only to have to live 3m (or was it 9m?) underground so you don't get bombarded with unsafe levels of even more radiation. OH WHAT A VIEW! And for what? A rocky desert with nothing useful on it? And what science would a human be able to do that a robot would not, and for far longer? We shouldn't be ever trying to live out there.
</end rant>
