> A first version is always going to be low in scale

They don’t have a first version of the hard part: The electrical transmission.

Maybe this isn’t obvious to people who haven’t worked on solar power systems, but you can put a couple panels anywhere and generate electricity for a couple years. It doesn’t prove that it’s viable to run thousands of kilometers of panels.

It’s like baking a tray of muffins in your kitchen and saying you proved that you can run an industrial scale muffin factory. They are different problem sets.