Sorry, the amount of solar power delivered by those eternally lit peaks will not provide a significant amount of power.
Those eternally sunlit areas comprise in total, “a few football fields”.
Some figures:
- On earth, one hectare of solar panels delivers a bit less than 1 gigawatt per year of solar power. That’s the average for all solar installations in the US, most of which are in the desert Southwest.
- in space, you get about 3x as much solar power per area as a dry sunny desert on earth.
One gigawatt hour per year equals 114kw per hour, if i did my math right. So if “a few football fields” constitutes 10 hectares, and we totally blanket those areas with solar panels, we will get 114x10x3 = around 3,500 kilowatts per hour.
That’s a lot for powering battery operated robot rovers and it might be enough for keeping the lights on in a small manned research station. It’s a pittance for any kind of large scale industrial use.
PS: It’s totally possible to power a polar lunar mining base, without messing around with those eternally sunlit peaks. Run power lines from the pole to 3 solar power installations a hundred or so Km from the pole, equally separated in longitude. At least one power station will always be in sunlight, and you can build as many thousands of hectares of solar panels as you need to power your mining operation.
eta: added citation links.
eta2: Some examples of energy demands that a Lunar ice-mining operation might have:
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Heat of fusion of ice is 334 mj per tonne, about 93 kw, but we’ll be heating mixed ice-rock, if we’re very lucky and the ore we mine is around 50% ice, and allowing for distillation, pumping, and filtering, we’re looking at about 200 kw to melt and extract a ton of water from the “ore.”
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If we’re using it for rocket fuel, then we need 50kw to perform electrolysis on 9kg of water, producing 1kg of hydrogen. Our 10 hectares of solar panels produce only 84,000 kwh per day, so at the very maximum, we can produce 1.6 tonnes of hydrogen per day.
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Liquification of hydrogen takes 10kw/kg, or 10,000 kw/tonne. At an absolute maximum, we can turn 8.4 tons of hydrogen into LH2 per day.
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The Atomic Rockets site includes figures for an earth orbit to lunar orbit nuclear powered cargo/passenger transport, which, if I read the tables correctly, would require 40 tonnes of LH2 per round trip. It would take 24 days to produce that much hydrogen from water and another 5 days to turn it into LH2, so we’re looking at a maximum of 1 cargo ship per month being fueled by our mining station if we just use the power from the eternally sunlit areas at the pole.
PPS, I tried to calculate the energy required for the actual mining operation, but the figures I found were in liters of diesel per day, and figuring the conversion to electric vehicles defeated me, especially since most of the numbers I found were relevant for cars and I don’t know how well they would apply to heavy earth moving equipment. For those braver than I, An open pit mine on earth processing 10,000 tonnes of ore and rock per day uses 4,751 liters of diesel fuel per day (they also need 3 tonnes of explosives per day).
