Time to kill a whole lot of pandas and collect their blood to extract the antibiotics.

There was an article earlier in the Times, before this one, that detailed how homes with existing Solar Panels did not have electricity after the storm because they were designed to feed directly into the grid,not store locally in batteries. This is a cheaper design. The houses usually still ran off the grid. The grid had to be powered down in places to prevent downed power lines from killing people and the Solar Panels had to stop feeding electricity into the grid to allow workers to repair lines. In order for people to go off the grid they would need to put in banks of batteries. People tend to put them in basements which would have been a bad idea in this case because in a lot of places the basements flooded. This proposal advocates changing the current default Solar installation to allow people to go off the grid when the grid goes down.

Even though shows like Star Trek show Dyson spheres to be a solid objects, Dyson originally meant it to be more like a sphericle cloud of technology that surrounds a star. The cloud could be made up of hollowed out asteroids or spacestations or nano-bots. All of these would intercept the energy from the local sun.If some leaked through between two space stations someone else would build a space station further out and intercept the overflow. There might be a high probability of collision, but the cloud will not fall into the sun in one piece.

He mentions that an aquaculture farm is letting him use their greenhouses. The name contains "Dulce" which made me think of "Dulse" a seaweed that people in Ireland eat. It is not only the Japanese and Koreans (and aparently the Hawaiins) who eat seaweed. I would guess Dulse is a cold water seaweed and unsuitable for a greenhouse in Austin Texas

350 pounds? With a weight budget like that, they could have sent me to the edge of space. That would have been an amateur record.;)

I think they got the measurements and units wrong. The article says that the power would not be generated like a windmill but from a wire. Then it says that the wire would be relatively short and the sail impossibly huge. Chances are the article got it wrong and the reality is that a small sail would be used to tow out a long 5,000 mile spool of wire. As the solarwind particles cross over the wire it will create the electricity just like passing a wire through a magnetic field creates electricity. I would like to read the original source rather than this typical example of science journalism.