> Multiple Gigawatt. Still orders of magnitude better than solar; still less land area. Land area is an absolute non issue for solar. With the exception of som

> Multiple Gigawatt. Still orders of magnitude better than solar; still less land area. Land area is an absolute non issue for solar. With the exception of somewhere like luxembourg, just the roofs of the residential areas of a country have enough area to provide the total primary energy consumption. The singular and overriding factor is cost and cost of storing or moving the energy. Which brings me to > The land-based panels are 42lbs for 450W. The space-based ones are 6W per gram. Lots of room in the equation for cooling. You're not going to get nameplate capacity, and the weight is in the superstructure, cooling system, power delivery, and your 100s of metres aperture laser or maser. The actual panel for a terrestrial caravan system I installed recently weighed no more than the panels listed here https://www.spectrolab.com/DataSheets/Panel/panels.pdf https://www.spectrolab.com/DataSheets/Panel/panels.pdf (although it was bigger). So you're proposing spending 10x as much on panels, another 10x as much on cooling, spending as much again on a transmitter, then as much again on a receiver. All to burn tens of kg of methane per watt in order to get the thing into a stationary orbit. Then you have a gigawatt death beam fucking up the atmosphere and making a square kilometer or so uninhabitable. > Like the hot air about 9X being so far from the truth Comparing like for like, you have about 1.3kW in space vs 1kW on the ground, and a tracking setup can get 6kWh/day out of a 1kW panel at low to moderate latitudes (where well over half of the world's population lives). This is a factor of 5 to 6 better, although your space based panel is vastly more expensive and a tracking system is pointless because cost is the limit, not area. This is the most efficient high power long range wireless transmission system I can see mentioned: https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1049/iet-map.2017.0530 https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1049... which brings the ratio to around 3-4. Except you also have to deal with losses due to clouds and dust so 2-3 is more likely. At that point just build a nuclear plant. They're awful but they're better than this plan by every metric. Or do the sensible sane thing and build 100x the terrestrial solar for the same price (or 10x as much and enough storage) and save the space arrays for stuff in space -- once you're lifting megatons it makes far more sense to refine metals from asteroids and just leave 99% of them up there. Or as I said, just burn the rocket fuel in a gas turbine. You'll get more energy out of it than you would from this utterly ridiculous machine in its lifetime. If area was a constraint important enough to make space based solar viable we'd see water cooled triple junction cells as well as tracking on any utility scale installations near the equator (as this would reduce area by 2/3rds). We don't so it can be safely dismissed as more solar frickin roadways.