You get an Australian Solar Panel Farm (RAR!)

[Zor]

In this scenario, due to an act of ROB you are given you the ownership of an odd asset. Namely a Western Australian Solar Farm, as well as some plain tickets to get to it to investigated. In most cases a solar farm refers a site with a bunch of solar panels that provides electricity for commercial sale. This one in different. Here you don't just collect solar energy using solar panels, you GROW solar panels.

The farm itself is located in the Western Australian desert three hours drive east of Perth and covers some four square kilometers of desert. On which is a well equipped, comfortable and air conditioned office/living quarters for you and the staff, some warehouses, a loading station, a laboratory, a few vehicles (including trucks, bikes, some ATVs and some specialized machinery), a chain link fence, a pit with a backhoe, a dirt heap, a few specialized facilities and the fields in which your first crop is reaching maturity. A few "Early Bloomers" have been harvested, tested and are ready for market.

Over most of your four square kilometers of land are what can be described as "Machine Plants". They have a rough structure similar to that of terrestrial plants, with roots, stems and 'leaves'. However unlike organic plants they are nanotechnological constructs. Each machine plant starts out as a Seed, basically a small (1.5cm across) self contained module with a small solar panel, a playload of constructor nanites inside, a basic computer node which coordinates development and a small battery. If planted in dirt like that in Australia, the Seed will take in raw materials from the surrounding enviroment through an expanding network of roots and use them to grow it's solar panel and a prop it up on a stem (also covered in photovoltaic cells). As it grows, it will also build and grow wind vanes along the length of it's stem to make use of wind power to augment it's power output and continue to grow along it's designated sequence. The stem of a machine plant will grow to a height of about a meter and 5 to 3cm thick and on top of it will grow a hexagonal solar panel exactly 20cm to a side. Each panel has a pair of electrodes on the back, as well as growing seeds a couple at a time as long as it has a full sized panel. Said solar panel operates at 75% efficiency and will continue to work after being harvested (which involves carefully cutting the panel free from the stem), though the nanites in it will die shortly afterwards.

Each machine plant is given a square meter all to itself and there are some 3,000,000 individual machine plants on your land. To continue to be productive, the field will need to be 'fertilized', which means putting down a layer of dirt rich in raw materials to replace the depleted dirt that it had just fed on. Water does not adversely effect the machine plants. The machine plants do make "Plantcrap", which is lengths of unwanted or surplus elements, which accumulates near the base. Each machine plant can produce a solar panel ready for harvesting every four months and takes nine to eleven months to reach maturity

The farm has the following staff, as well as a bank account which will keep them paid for the next four months...

• Dr. Ania Liebowitz, Engineering (AKA Miss Sunshine). Head of Machine Plant analysis. She examines the machine plants (both in the lab and as they grow) and writes reports on how well they are doing. She has a staff of Tim Henderson and Anne Kelly.
• Dr. Romeo Ramerez, geologist (AKA Doc Dirt). Doc Dirt's job is to monitor the soil to see how good it is for the needs of growing productive machine plants, as well as analyzing the chemical composition of the plantcrap and similar tasks. As a short term measure to ensure a supply of viable dirt a hole has been dug to get a reserve of dirt. Has the assistance of Joe Napier.
• Bob Liang, mechanic. He keeps the general conventional machinery working.
• Stephen Nanopoulos. Vehicle Operator. First aide qualified.
• Sally Nesbitt: Accountant.
• Six general farmhands.
• Hiroshi Fujikawa: chef.

Each person has a studio apartment while you have a four room suite.

What do you do?

Zor

[bilateralrope]

I'd like to run this farm as a business. Grow the panels and sell them. Or maybe sell the entire farm to somebody who will keep it running and retire with a large pile of cash.

Step one is to hire a lawyer to make sure the legal side of things is taken care of.

How viable would it be to expand the farm and/or make a second farm elsewhere ?

To continue to be productive, the field will need to be 'fertilized', which means putting down a layer of dirt rich in raw materials to replace the depleted dirt that it had just fed on.

What raw materials are we talking about here ?

More importantly, how much does the 'fertilizer' cost ?

The machine plants do make "Plantcrap", which is lengths of unwanted or surplus elements, which accumulates near the base

What does the plantcrap consist of ?

Can I make use of it in any way ?

Would anyone want to buy it ?

If nobody would want to buy it, how much does it cost to properly dispose of it ?

[U.P. Cinnabar]

bilateralrope asked the question I was going to ask about the plantcrap.

Can the seeds be shipped and planted anywhere in the world. If so, wouldn't you be better off exporting the seeds to budding solar farms elsewhere in the world? Even if they can't, surely they could be modified for growth anywhere, anytime; the money one could make from being able to market "a Solar Tree in every front yard!"

[bilateralrope]

I wouldn't want to export the seeds to any farms not under my control. That just leads to competitors reducing my profits.

[Zor]

bilateralrope asked the question I was going to ask about the plantcrap.

Can the seeds be shipped and planted anywhere in the world. If so, wouldn't you be better off exporting the seeds to budding solar farms elsewhere in the world? Even if they can't, surely they could be modified for growth anywhere, anytime; the money one could make from being able to market "a Solar Tree in every front yard!"

They can grow elsewhere, however cloud cover and low winds can distinctly hinder their growth. Even if you got optimum dirt to grow them in a seed planted in Moscow would grow much more slowly than one in Australia.

Zor

[Darth Tanner]

I send 5 plants to every university in the world for free to unlock the nanotech age. I sell plants to industry and sell the rest as a going concern destroying solar panels industry in Australia and get filthy rich. I have no interest in running a business on the other side of the planet to me.

On the other hand if Fujikawa is capable of operating the plan on his own with little imput from me I'd be happy to maintain ownership...

I am however unconvinced what the per unit cost for each solar panel I produce would be compared to normal mass manufactured ones... the current production method isnt really that expensive for me to be undercutting it. I'm also unsure if I can get away with purposefully dumping the required raw materials in the dirt... I imagine that would be illegal in the EU so Australia might have similar limitations.

Hexagonal panels 20cm to a side are hardly the most productive shape or size... people using my panels would have more wiring and fitting cost than with larger traditional manufactured panels.

[Purple]

First thing first. I start saving up for a large house built on concrete stilts which them self are surrounded by barbed wire that's electrified. Also automatic machine gun turrets in 14.5 Soviet. Australia is a death world. I do not want to be murderskullraped by the wildlife before I can get rich enough off this to start remotely considering giving some of it to benefit mankind too.

[Simon_Jester]

I assume you chose a heavy antimateriel machine gun caliber because you're worried about the dropbears?

[Purple]

To be perfectly honest I figure 5.56 would do just as well. But with the kind of money this farm will be bringing in I can afford to spring on a little bit extra to bring a smile to my face.

[Me2005]

Good grief; I've got people who really know what they're doing (PhD's?!) running a farm? This thing should already be self-sustaining as-explained.

I am however unconvinced what the per unit cost for each solar panel I produce would be compared to normal mass manufactured ones... the current production method isnt really that expensive for me to be undercutting it...Hexagonal panels 20cm to a side are hardly the most productive shape or size... people using my panels would have more wiring and fitting cost than with larger traditional manufactured panels.

Does not matter when my panels are 2x more efficient than bleeding edge panels and 4x more than market panels, and I can make them for literally the cost of dirt. Maybe some special additives here and there, but my interpretation of the jist of the post is that the additives aren't more than fertilizer would be. Also, these are about half the size of regular household panels, which is a plus in my book.

My land currently encompasses 4,000,000 m^2, and I'm probably close to maxed out utilizing 3,000,000 m^2 for plants and some for overhead and housing. I can probably buy up loads of land for dirt cheap since these things grow ideally in what is literally an uninhabitable desert. Even the government would be likely to sell it to me, once I let them in on my totally secret operation that would definitely have walls. Looks like there is even a likely more than suitable plot publicly available (somewhere in Australia; but proximity doesn't really matter for this kind of thing if I know the harvest will happen in ~9-11 months and then every 4 months after that) for an extra 9ish km area for $2 million. Assuming the rate above holds for this extra plot, I can put down another 6-7 million plants.

While looking to find the utility of these panels, I found this:

...[Solar Panel] efficiency effectively maps to area. A typical location within the U.S. gets an annual average of 5 full-sun-equivalent hours per day. This means that the 1000 W/m² solar flux reaching the ground when the sun is straight overhead is effectively available for 5 hours each day. Each square meter of panel is therefore exposed to 5 kWh of solar energy per day. ... A typical American home uses 30 kWh of electricity per day...

So it takes 8 of my grown panels (30kwh/(5kwh*75%)) to power the typical American home. Just one crop of these panels could power 375,000 homes, and I'll get in a new crop every 4 months. Once I acquire and plant my extensions, I'll be able to power another 750,000 homes every 4 months. A quick google says home panels sell for around $200/panel, but mine are 4-5x more efficient and you need 1/3 as many to power your house so they're more appealing and selling them for $500/panel wouldn't be cheating anyone except the power companies. I'd make 1.5 BILLION every 4 months selling those that way.

As another venture, a Tesla model S has a powerpack between 60 and 85kwh; but more importantly, from this post has a draw of 350 or so watts per mile. To go 60 MPH the car would draw 21 Kwh, which at 3.75 kwh/panel means you'd need 6 panels for the car. The car has about a 10 sq. meter footprint, so I'd say I can start making solar-powered cars at a significant savings over battery power and I can still make a killing as I'd be selling these at a premium on premium cars. Since the battery packs on those are $10,000 and my household panels are selling for $500/each, I'd easily save Musk $2,000 by cutting his pack in half and replacing it with $3,000 of panels. BUT if I went this route first, I could more easily control distribution and charge $600/panel, with Musk still saving money, for a total sale of 1.8 billion. Every 4 months.

And in either case, that income should scale exponentially as I use the money to acquire more super cheap land - land literally no one could even care about in some cases - the less rain that falls the better for the crop. Looks like just in Australia, there is 1.35 million km of desert I could feasibly use. Using it all with the above efficiency, I'd end up with 1,012,500,000,000 plants, powering 72,321,428,570 home/car combos every 4 months. And it doesn't even matter if my math is off, because if those are within a few orders of magnitude of right I'd power a home and car with American-style energy usage for every person on the plant, their pets, and their livestock every four months.

Once I'd sold my initial wave or three to get the money to build out, I'd start scaling down the price until I was selling the things cheap. Like, a few dollars each; whatever the final cost is for me to grow, fertilize, and harvest the things. It should be pretty low - current farming requires much more work than these sound like they do, on much more valuable land, with a comparatively high probability of failure due to things this crop is immune to. Once that happens, no person or country in their right mind would use anything else for regular daytime operations. And at some point, these might even be cheaper to use as a building material than current materials, so it's possible people would just build houses out of stacks of panels. Or the 'chaff' that collects around the base, or the crushed up plants themselves since they only take a year to grow. Especially when the other option is mostly trees which take decades to mature to usefulness and are made of wood which is susceptible to rot and various other maladies.

This is the ultimate cash-crop: It uses poor-quality land, has no natural predators, pests, or disease, requires only light labor (from the OP, we've got enough to manage our current 4 km lot with a total of 16 people (me + the helpers), and generates a huge income per harvest. Even down to $1/panel, I'm making $2.25 million/year off each km of land. The *only* problem, and it's probably one that can be solved with the plant-trash (nudges Zor), is that power storage is quickly going to be a much bigger issue than power generation. Much more than it already is, because the current situation has us using mostly fueled power with little intermittent power. With the efficiency, we'd be best off pumping fluids around or compressing air until someone figured out a worthwhile battery that wasn't toxic and didn't degrade to uselessness every few years.

[Simon_Jester]

While looking to find the utility of these panels, I found this:

...[Solar Panel] efficiency effectively maps to area. A typical location within the U.S. gets an annual average of 5 full-sun-equivalent hours per day. This means that the 1000 W/m² solar flux reaching the ground when the sun is straight overhead is effectively available for 5 hours each day. Each square meter of panel is therefore exposed to 5 kWh of solar energy per day. ... A typical American home uses 30 kWh of electricity per day...

So it takes 8 of my grown panels (30kwh/(5kwh*75%)) to power the typical American home. Just one crop of these panels could power 375,000 homes, and I'll get in a new crop every 4 months. Once I acquire and plant my extensions, I'll be able to power another 750,000 homes every 4 months. A quick google says home panels sell for around $200/panel, but mine are 4-5x more efficient and you need 1/3 as many to power your house so they're more appealing and selling them for $500/panel wouldn't be cheating anyone except the power companies. I'd make 1.5 BILLION every 4 months selling those that way.

That's a time-average. Your solar powered cars won't run reliably or for long in temperate latitudes during winter, not without significant battery storage and a charging mechanism. Nor, obviously, will they perform well at night or in adverse weather of any kind... unless, again, you have big batteries.

The solar cells ARE nice as a trickle-charging mechanism for the battery but have some other drawbacks too:
1) Forget about parking the car in an indoor garage.
2) Or under a tree.
3) Plus you'll want to make sure the car is oriented so that the panels get the optimum sunlight, which may not align with the local parking lot lines.

As another venture, a Tesla model S has a powerpack between 60 and 85kwh; but more importantly, from this post has a draw of 350 or so watts per mile. To go 60 MPH the car would draw 21 Kwh, which at 3.75 kwh/panel means you'd need 6 panels for the car. The car has about a 10 sq. meter footprint, so I'd say I can start making solar-powered cars at a significant savings over battery power and I can still make a killing as I'd be selling these at a premium on premium cars. Since the battery packs on those are $10,000 and my household panels are selling for $500/each, I'd easily save Musk $2,000 by cutting his pack in half and replacing it with $3,000 of panels. BUT if I went this route first, I could more easily control distribution and charge $600/panel, with Musk still saving money, for a total sale of 1.8 billion. Every 4 months.

By building the cars with half the battery capacity you reduce their nighttime/evening driving range (when sunpower input is negligible) by half.

In short, you've just designed a car that may well not be able to handle a round trip of fifty kilometers each way after five p.m. on winter days. Not good.

And in either case, that income should scale exponentially as I use the money to acquire more super cheap land - land literally no one could even care about in some cases- t he less rain that falls the better for the crop. Looks like just in Australia, there is 1.35 million km of desert I could feasibly use. Using it all with the above efficiency, I'd end up with 1,012,500,000,000 plants, powering 72,321,428,570 home/car combos every 4 months. And it doesn't even matter if my math is off, because if those are within a few orders of magnitude of right I'd power a home and car with American-style energy usage for every person on the plant, their pets, and their livestock every four months.

For cars you smack into the lithium supply- you still need high energy batteries and that's the main limiting factor on electric cars right now as it is.

See, the supply of cars isn't determined by access to electricity, which is quite cheap everywhere in the developed world and is available nearly everywhere people normally drive. All you've done is supply free electricity. No, the bottleneck is making batteries, and your cars still need batteries and charging mechanisms comparable to what the Tesla already has in real life, or they're useless.

And at some point, these might even be cheaper to use as a building material than current materials, so it's possible people would just build houses out of stacks of panels. Or the 'chaff' that collects around the base, or the crushed up plants themselves since they only take a year to grow. Especially when the other option is mostly trees which take decades to mature to usefulness and are made of wood which is susceptible to rot and various other maladies.

Wood isn't brittle. I'm pretty sure photovoltaic panels are; there are probably reasons no one uses them as load-bearing structural elements in real life.

Brittle is bad because, for instance, you can't drive a nail into a photovoltaic panel without damaging it. Plus, they absorb a great deal of sunlight by design- they'd be very hot in summer and you would need to heavily insulate the inside of the walls, in which case you'll end up needing a load-bearing wooden framework or something just to hold up the insulation.

[Me2005]

That's a time-average. Your solar powered cars won't run reliably or for long in temperate latitudes during winter, not without significant battery storage and a charging mechanism. Nor, obviously, will they perform well at night or in adverse weather of any kind... unless, again, you have big batteries.

Yes, but that's why the vehicle would retain half the batteries. Daytime drivers in good climates get infinite range until the sun sets; nighttime/bad weather drivers have half the range. It's why I mentioned battery tech as being the big issue later on.

For cars you smack into the lithium supply- you still need high energy batteries and that's the main limiting factor on electric cars right now as it is.

Since you keep bringing it up, you may have missed a part of my post:

The *only* problem, and it's probably one that can be solved with the plant-trash (nudges Zor), is that power storage is quickly going to be a much bigger issue than power generation

And at some point, these might even be cheaper to use as a building material than current materials, so it's possible people would just build houses out of stacks of panels. Or the 'chaff' that collects around the base, or the crushed up plants themselves since they only take a year to grow.

Wood isn't brittle. I'm pretty sure photovoltaic panels are; there are probably reasons no one uses them as load-bearing structural elements in real life.

These are weird nano-tech alien PV cells. Who knows what they're made of or what their structural properties are? Or especially the stalks (which *must* be structural to hold the panel up off the ground) and chaff they produce. In the event they aren't great or are exactly the same as today's PV panels, there is still nothing stopping people using them from a rainscreen or panelized wall system where windows, which are also super brittle and generally would be poor building materials yet are ubiquitous, are used today.

[Simon_Jester]

That's a time-average. Your solar powered cars won't run reliably or for long in temperate latitudes during winter, not without significant battery storage and a charging mechanism. Nor, obviously, will they perform well at night or in adverse weather of any kind... unless, again, you have big batteries.

Yes, but that's why the vehicle would retain half the batteries. Daytime drivers in good climates get infinite range until the sun sets; nighttime/bad weather drivers have half the range. It's why I mentioned battery tech as being the big issue later on.

Yes. My point is that this is a serious enough issue with the car to make it uncompetitive. Getting free recharges in summer during the middle of the day does not offset having drastically less range than a conventional gasoline-powered car during nighttime, cloudy days, and virtually all the time during winter.

For cars you smack into the lithium supply- you still need high energy batteries and that's the main limiting factor on electric cars right now as it is.

Since you keep bringing it up, you may have missed a part of my post:

The *only* problem, and it's probably one that can be solved with the plant-trash (nudges Zor), is that power storage is quickly going to be a much bigger issue than power generation

What reason do you have to think that the 'plant-trash' is somehow a viable replacement for high-capacity batteries as we know them?

And at some point, these might even be cheaper to use as a building material than current materials, so it's possible people would just build houses out of stacks of panels. Or the 'chaff' that collects around the base, or the crushed up plants themselves since they only take a year to grow.

Wood isn't brittle. I'm pretty sure photovoltaic panels are; there are probably reasons no one uses them as load-bearing structural elements in real life.

These are weird nano-tech alien PV cells. Who knows what they're made of or what their structural properties are? Or especially the stalks (which *must* be structural to hold the panel up off the ground) and chaff they produce. In the event they aren't great or are exactly the same as today's PV panels, there is still nothing stopping people using them from a rainscreen or panelized wall system where windows, which are also super brittle and generally would be poor building materials yet are ubiquitous, are used today.

[/quote]People normally prefer their windows to be transparent, which solar panels are decidedly not. The only reason we use glass in buildings is where it is the only viable material choice that is acceptably transparent.

[KraytKing]

What reason do you have to think that the 'plant-trash' is somehow a viable replacement for high-capacity batteries as we know them?

The plantcrap was mentioned to contain unusable elements. If you planted them near lithium deposits and reconfigured them not to use lithium (if they do at all), then you could very quickly get a lot of lithium.

[KraytKing]

This leads me to my next point. Everyone yet has used the solar panel growers as just that. But with this technology, the possibilities are nearly limitless. Forget conventional mining techniques. Just call up whoever invented these and get them to reconfigure the plants to output certain elements as plantcrap and others in nice, neat ingots where the panels would normally be. And that's only one use. Consider reconfiguring them to grow houses, solving the whole structural-integrity issue. Or put them to more nefarious purposes, such as building a robot army to take over the world. Or use them to recycle with greater efficiency by planting them on top of landfills. Or do all of them at once. As I said, the possibilities are nearly limitless.

[Simon_Jester]

If you already know where a boatload of "lithium deposits" are, near enough to the surface to be reached by plant roots, why aren't you already mining the stuff? We're not short on the stuff because we don't know how to extract it from other materials, we're short on it because it's not present in more than trace quantities except in a handful of rare minerals.

[KraytKing]

If you already know where a boatload of "lithium deposits" are, near enough to the surface to be reached by plant roots, why aren't you already mining the stuff?

You don't have to know where the deposits are, just plant the solar trees (good name?) everywhere. And as these are not actual plants, there is no limit to how deep the roots can extend.

[Me2005]

Yes. My point is that this is a serious enough issue with the car to make it uncompetitive. Getting free recharges in summer during the middle of the day does not offset having drastically less range than a conventional gasoline-powered car during nighttime, cloudy days, and virtually all the time during winter.

75% efficiency gets you a pretty good ROI on sunlight, even if it doesn't get as much because of *whatever*. But yes, nighttime driving would be reduced by ~50% if I put in a ~50% sized battery. It'd need to be a design and marketing question of what the people would want, and what the best way to do that would be. I know *I* would rather have a car that could drive infinite miles during sunny weather, a significant amount of miles or get at least a full-recharge during the day in inclimate/shady/winter weather, and still do 100 miles in total darkness than one that can only do 200 miles total before needing a few-hour recharge.

For cars you smack into the lithium supply- you still need high energy batteries and that's the main limiting factor on electric cars right now as it is.

Since you keep bringing it up, you may have missed a part of my post:

The *only* problem, and it's probably one that can be solved with the plant-trash (nudges Zor), is that power storage is quickly going to be a much bigger issue than power generation

What reason do you have to think that the 'plant-trash' is somehow a viable replacement for high-capacity batteries as we know them?

Emphasis added. You parsed my sentence wrong. Yes, batteries are the biggest issue. Maybe the plant-stuff can fix it, maybe not. Failing that and running out of battery materials, we can fall back somewhat on mechanical storage methods like compressed air and moving water around. It won't be as energy-dense, but then, the solar panels aren't *that* small and if the vehicle gets bigger I can slap more of them on there without significantly increasing the mass of the car.

Wood isn't brittle. I'm pretty sure photovoltaic panels are; there are probably reasons no one uses them as load-bearing structural elements in real life.

These are weird nano-tech alien PV cells. Who knows what they're made of or what their structural properties are? Or especially the stalks (which *must* be structural to hold the panel up off the ground) and chaff they produce. In the event they aren't great or are exactly the same as today's PV panels, there is still nothing stopping people using them from a rainscreen or panelized wall system where windows, which are also super brittle and generally would be poor building materials yet are ubiquitous, are used today.

People normally prefer their windows to be transparent, which solar panels are decidedly not. The only reason we use glass in buildings is where it is the only viable material choice that is acceptably transparent.

(An aside: Bricks and blocks are both load-bearing structural elements that are also brittle. We don't use PV panels structurally in real life because they're too valuable to use that way, if they were cheaper than any known structure you can bet we figure out how to use them that way.)

And in skyscrapers, where it's used as basically the entire exterior cladding because it lets in light and is about as cheap to do as anything else, and probably cheaper when you figure the weight of other materials. And where, IIRC, there have been suggestions of cladding large portions with PV cells.

Regardless, if they grow like plants and I can actually manage a 3 million plant farm with the ~16 people I have, they're likely cheaper than any other material available per square foot. If I just don't plug them in, and use them to replace exterior cladding materials like vinyl, cement fiberboard, cedar, aluminum, T-111, etc.etc., we're talking $0.11/ft. Regular cladding? T-111 is the cheapest nastiest stuff around. I've gotten a 3/8" sheet (i.e.: Not really what you would actually put on your house, where you start at 1/2" and go up) of it from an outlet store for $0.56/ft. T-111 lasts a long time (30-50 years if you paint it and keep it from staying wet), but a PV panel should last at least as long. We won't find good data, as most of the life expectancy for PV panels is their output life, but here's the first google result for "pv panel life expectancy"

The majority of manufacturers offer the 25-year standard solar panel warranty, which means that power output should not be less than 80% of rated power after 25 years.

80% at 25 years? If I don't care about output % any longer because I'm literally just using them as siding (Keeping in mind, 80% of a panel you'd put on your house today is like 20% of one of our panels; so if there's a linear falloff we'd be talking 100 years to get to the regular panel's useful life), I suspect they'd keep going basically forever. And since they cost so little, you could build the wall's cladding 5 panels thick and still save money over using the cheapest siding on the market. With that many, you could probably just stack them up and use them as a wall.

Oh, and they don't require nearly the environmental destruction that most of the cladding products we use does: Wood for wood siding is preferably old-growth (40-100+ years and not this 20-year garbage we're getting now), wood pulp is used in cement fiber board, bricks and blocks are baked, vinyl is a plastic, etc. etc.

Now, my math starts failing when I start needing to sell these for around $10/each. But even then, they're probably competitive with most other products, and I'd be grossing 12,000,000/year; or about a million per person on the farm. Obviously overhead (property tax, utilities, equipment, shipping) eats some of that, but it couldn't be enough to not also pay myself and my workers well while expanding.

This leads me to my next point. Everyone yet has used the solar panel growers as just that. But with this technology, the possibilities are nearly limitless.

Nay, I have suggested using the plant-junk and solar-trees as building material as well. If they can hold up the panel flat on top, they've got to be useful for some structural thing. Even if they're not great, they still grow at a crazy rate of full maturity every year. And if they're also some form of metal...

Forget conventional mining techniques. Just call up whoever invented these and get them to reconfigure the plants to output certain elements as plantcrap and others in nice, neat ingots where the panels would normally be. And that's only one use. Consider reconfiguring them to grow houses, solving the whole structural-integrity issue. Or put them to more nefarious purposes, such as building a robot army to take over the world.

I'm operating under the assumption that I have no clue how these work or who made them, and that whoever did it is not coming forward.

Or use them to recycle with greater efficiency by planting them on top of landfills.

This is a great idea though! I can start accepting the world's trash as fertilizer and charge them to do it! And and probably get massive subsidies/grants to get the trash out of the government's hands. Blow people's minds by giving away all the solar cells while still making a profit!

[Simon_Jester]

If you already know where a boatload of "lithium deposits" are, near enough to the surface to be reached by plant roots, why aren't you already mining the stuff?

You don't have to know where the deposits are, just plant the solar trees (good name?) everywhere. And as these are not actual plants, there is no limit to how deep the roots can extend.

That sounds... incredibly stupidly unrealistic. First of all, you seem to be assuming that if you just randomly spam solar cell plants all over the world you'll somehow find 'deposits' of rare minerals that just happen to have escaped the notice of real geologists. Second, you seem to be assuming these deposits are anywhere near the surface- what if they're in a vein of rock 500 feet underground? There's no realistic way that 'plants' with roots are going to be a more efficient way to find such things than digging a mine.

[KraytKing]

That sounds... incredibly stupidly unrealistic.

This is a discussion on GROWING SOLAR PANELS and you call me unrealistic.

Second, you seem to be assuming these deposits are anywhere near the surface- what if they're in a vein of rock 500 feet underground? There's no realistic way that 'plants' with roots are going to be a more efficient way to find such things than digging a mine.

Consider how conventional mining works, then tell me that a millimeter-thick metal wire sucking up and sorting minerals on the elemental level wouldn't be more efficient.

[KraytKing]

First of all, you seem to be assuming that if you just randomly spam solar cell plants all over the world you'll somehow find 'deposits' of rare minerals that just happen to have escaped the notice of real geologists.

There is no way geologists have found every significant amount of lithium on the planet. And plenty of lithium that has been found goes untouched because of the cost to create an enormous mine to get a few scattered deposits. The solar trees, on the other hand, would be able to pull up lithium as a byproduct while collecting solar energy, and with far less environmental impact.
And even the trees not designed to mine lithium could find some while just doing their job and mix it in with the rest of the plantcrap. If operation were to expand across the globe and every solar tree dug a thousand feet into the ground, I'd think the odds of finding some lithium would be quite good.

[Simon_Jester]

That sounds... incredibly stupidly unrealistic.

This is a discussion on GROWING SOLAR PANELS and you call me unrealistic.

It's as if we were having a conversation about laser pistols (an unlikely but imaginable technology) and you said "I think we should shoot the lasers at trees and turn them into apple pies. Because lasers can do that."

See, the idea of a nanotechnological construct that 'grows' into a solar panel by consuming materials found commonly in the soil may be unlikely, but it's a specific thing. It's not a magic cure-all, and it doesn't circumvent basic facts abour rocks or chemistry.

Second, you seem to be assuming these deposits are anywhere near the surface- what if they're in a vein of rock 500 feet underground? There's no realistic way that 'plants' with roots are going to be a more efficient way to find such things than digging a mine.

Consider how conventional mining works, then tell me that a millimeter-thick metal wire sucking up and sorting minerals on the elemental level wouldn't be more efficient.

Infinitely more efficient. A bunch of miners digging a hole know how to get to the rocks. How does a plant on the surface know where to go? Why would the same technological 'plant' be optimally efficient for building solar cells and for leaching rare minerals out of the entire volume of a huge pile of rock hundreds of feet away that it doesn't even know are there?

[Me2005]

And plenty of lithium that has been found goes untouched because of the cost to create an enormous mine to get a few scattered deposits.

This would be a fair point, if we can modify the trees to be useful for mining. Or if they *require* materials that they find by this concept, so they obtain more materials than we can usefully mine.

And even the trees not designed to mine lithium could find some while just doing their job and mix it in with the rest of the plantcrap. If operation were to expand across the globe and every solar tree dug a thousand feet into the ground, I'd think the odds of finding some lithium would be quite good.

Emphasis added. What tree have you ever heard of that digs a thousand feet into the ground?!?!. Why do these ones suddenly do that? Why are they even *capable* of that? Per the OP, they are basically nano-tech plants 1m high that require 1m2 of space each. 1m2. That does not imply, to me, that they grow very deep into the ground. I suppose they probably grow 2-4x as deep as they are tall, so they go 2-4m down. That feels deep and somewhat post-like for a regular plant (a real tree spreads it's roots at least as far as the canopy sideways as well as down), but whatever. It's nowhere near 1,000 feet. Even if you *could* modify these plants, there is no guarantee that they could physically do that.

As I mentioned earlier, I usually try to treat these RAR-things as black-boxes: We can't change the way they work, we can just take advantage of them as they work.

[KraytKing]

Infinitely more efficient. A bunch of miners digging a hole know how to get to the rocks. How does a plant on the surface know where to go? Why would the same technological 'plant' be optimally efficient for building solar cells and for leaching rare minerals out of the entire volume of a huge pile of rock hundreds of feet away that it doesn't even know are there?

That's just it. You have a large number of miners and their machinery diverted to dig a massive hole to suck up what could be tiny amounts of lithium. These plant roots were described to be able to sort through elements and find what they need and what they don't in very low-density areas (dirt), so it isn't much of a stretch for you to simply make the roots grow longer and never harvest the solar panels to make up for it. And as I said earlier, the lithium could simply be a byproduct.

[KraytKing]

And even the trees not designed to mine lithium could find some while just doing their job and mix it in with the rest of the plantcrap. If operation were to expand across the globe and every solar tree dug a thousand feet into the ground, I'd think the odds of finding some lithium would be quite good.

Emphasis added. What tree have you ever heard of that digs a thousand feet into the ground?!?!. Why do these ones suddenly do that? Why are they even *capable* of that?

When have you ever heard of a tree that grows photovoltaics? Granted, a thousand may be a bit of a stretch, but my point still stands. If you modified them to expand the root system instead of growing solar cells, then it could get quite large (though it would be a long-term project). And as for capability, we have drills that can dig quite far into the ground. If these plant roots are basically drills, why couldn't they do the same?