Comment by jrk
8 hours ago
The 1TW is the rated peak power output. It's essentially the same in space. The thing that changes is the average fraction of this sustained over time (due to day/night/seasons/atmosphere, or the lack of all of the above).
It's still the same 1TW theoretical peak in space, it's just that you can actually use close to that full capacity all the time, whereas on earth you'd need to over-provision substantially and add storage, so 1TW of panels can only drive perhaps a few hundred GW of average load.
> the whole capacity
Wouldn’t something like half of the panels be in shadow at any time?
Depends where you put them. The current vogue option is a sun-synchronous orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
polar orbit