system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Matrix] Why didn't the machines just build towers with solar collectors to rise above the scortched sky?

Previous to the nuclear winter we know they used solar power for energy.  Surely that would have been easier than enslaving  humanity, turn each person into a battery and create The Matrix.
gpt
When they say the "sky", it really means that humanity has surrounded the earth with a "cloud" potentially all the way up to orbit level. It was too high for any structure to reach up so they would simply become unstable. Buildings more than a mile or two are just not worth bothering to build and it would be easy to have the "cloud" stretch much higher up than that - low earth orbit is about 100 miles up. 

it also wasn't needed, the machines would have had no problem extracting energy from geothermal sources - we see their huge drills and they are unlikely to have been built specially for drilling into Zion, it's not efficient, to build them just for that. They were designed to drill down into the earth to allow the machines access to as much geothermal energy as they needed. 

The machines didn't really care about using the humans as a power source, people are an awful source of power, needing more energy to go in than comes out. Machines were just keeping humans safe. they had no desire to exterminate the creators, simply put them somewhere they they would be happy, out the way and no longer trying to destroy the machines. 

(META: it should also be noted that the original plan for the movie was for humans to be being used as a network, their brains being efficient processors, but that was scrapped as being too confusing and the idea of them as batteries used instead, despite it making no sense.)