16 trillion small, unsteerable, solar sails all sitting at the boundary between the Sun and Earth's gravitational influence. As light pressure pushes these things out of the L1 point they will all make their way to the Earth where they will enter the atmosphere and give up their gravitational potential as heat. Does their shading effect counter the fact that they will all give back some heat?
The potential energy is close to the energy used during launch. And every time we launch a rocket/sat (and then it comes back eventually) we heat up the atmosphere a bit.
The potential energy due to gravity is separate from the potential energy due to embedded chemical energy, which I suspect would be bigger for such a shape, given drag. (Since energy is proportional to velocity-squared.)
