The article makes references to atmospheric conditions: > "Because of limitations imposed by the atmosphere on the effective transmission of energy within cert

The article makes references to atmospheric conditions: > "Because of limitations imposed by the atmosphere on the effective transmission of energy within certain sections of the electromagnetic spectrum, researchers have focused on microwave, millimeter-wave, and optical frequencies." It seems likely that water vapor is the big issue, and that's pretty variable across a lot of regions, and fog and cloud formation would be an additional issue. Hence, this is probably going to be more for relatively short-distance applications (the demo they discuss is a few hundred meters) on Earth. However, in space-to-space applications this doesn't seem to be an issue. Maybe something like solar satellites in orbit around the Moon beaming power to Moonbase would be an option. For really long-distance energy transport on Earth, the transport of stored chemical or nuclear energy (hydrocarbons or uranium basically, or maybe iron?) are really the only plausible options.