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by dTal 2160 days ago
What on earth do you need 20 kilowatts continuous for? That's a huge amount of power for domestic use.
3 comments

Typical US domestic service is 24kW (120V/200A nominal at the main breaker).
Fair enough. Still, it's one thing to be specced for 24kW peak load (the breaker) and quite another to require 20kW continuous (two 10kW nuclear power plants). I still think 20kW is an awfully huge amount of power - the average US house only uses about 1 kilowatt when you smooth it out.
(1) Heat. Space is cold. (-100c)

(2) Cooling. Space is hot. (+400c)

(3) Running the computer.

(4) Running the communications gear.

(5) Cooling 4+5.

I'd be amazed if GP's house is in space. But hey, life's full of surprises!
How can you use electricity to cool things in space?
Same as in a car or any air conditioner. You pump a hot fluid to/from radiators. Look at the iss. See the big black structures always held perpendicular to the solar panels. Those are the radiators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...

You build your walls out of Peltier elements. On one side of capsule, hot side will be in, cold side out, the other side of the capsule, the reverse. And then you use the generated power to drive a laser to shoot the energy right back into the sun.
Piezo-electric? But then you need to cool the other side even more..
You run a pump on a coolant loop, just like any air conditioner.
What on earth do you need more than 640k of memory for? That's a huge amount of memory for domestic use.

Nobody knows what kind of innovations a huge readily available sustainable energy supply would allow, but I bet they'd be cool.