Cool analysis. I love all analyses of solar, even if I don't agree with their findings, I know if the findings make solar look less than awesome, something has been missed.
In your analysis, it seems missed that the sun is the only actual issuer of energy, and that those Joules are additional to the existing Joules on Earth.
We have to account for the energy we get from all other sources being in a way, secondhand, with energy obtained by those means, there always has to be a "middle-man" in the chain of getting the energy of the sun to us, involving some kind of labor of extraction, which itself uses energy from finite stored sources.
A by-product of that labor, in all cases, is pollution, which results directly from the destruction of whatever it was that was created by nature, using the energy of the sun.
But when we take the energy of the sun firsthand and convert it to fuel ourselves, by electrolysis for example, that fuel used to power all manner of things, including backing up the energy of the sun, generates no pollution, no matter how we wish to use it, be it by reverse electrolysis fuel cells back to electricity, or by internal combustion engines, there is no generation of pollution.
That is a very significant result, in which we should see a message, of how to use energy correctly and sustainably, forever.
On doubts as to whether or not we can live entirely from the power of the sun, consider that all of nature already lives from it, all we need to do is learn how it does it, and do it better, like we always do when we make our human versions of things done by nature. Birds fly, but we fly much faster and much higher. We now have ways to create food ideal for our consumption directly from sunlight converted to electricity (see "Solein"), by a biologically assisted electrolysis process, and we make it much faster and more efficiently than nature.
Hydrogen which functionally replaces fossil fuels with none of the pollution as above, is created in minutes, seconds, hours, days, whereas nature took millions of years to create fossil fuels.
Where I am going with all of this, is to highlight that processes like these have been used increasingly over the past ten years or so, continuing to scale up by things like the "Money-fuel tree", injecting a cumulative, highly valuable, growing flow of valuable physical product into our economy, as we put them all to use.
Now by Austrian Economics, we should be issuing money to reflect all of that solar product put to use. Whilst we don't do that, money continues to lose value, because it is increasingly no longer representing actual product, since the product itself is the thing of value, not the money.
The kicker for banks, and others who are trying to maintain the old system, is that the only way to reflect this product donated to us from the sun, honestly and accurately, therefore assuring the value of their money in markets, is to donate continuous free money to all people, aspiring towards a Joules per token money standard, like pow tokens already are.
This breaks the deadly chain of every promise to pay being a promise to extract.
We might see this as a necessary move, from capitalism, to Energyism. I certainly do.
This isn't just a small amount, it is significant, on a par with the highest stimulus issued during covid, it represents an awful lot of accumlated solar energy product put to use historically. Note that was when we saw oil prices go negative, at the same time as the dollar went up.
I call this "Kardashev Money", and the Systems Engineering around all things associated, (The entire energy system of Earth, humanity, and the sun), the study of it is what I call "Kardashev Engineering", for want of a better term. They are all Systems Engineering abstractions, but absolutely solid concepts.
I hope you agree this outweighs any Achilles heels we might otherwise think exists with solar.
