I encourage you to watch The Future of Solar Power [1]. I am firmly of the belief that solar power is humanity's future of energy production. Yes, beaming pow

I encourage you to watch The Future of Solar Power [1]. I am firmly of the belief that solar power is humanity's future of energy production. Yes, beaming power to Earth is viable and could be economical. This pretty much solves the problem in variable power generation. I've seen estimates that a space-based power collector could generate about 6-8x what that same collector could on Earth (due to atmosphere, weather and day/night) so even with some power loss from beaming power to Earth, it's viable. But there's an even better fguture for this. The first is as the power source for space habitats. You literally just put them on the outside hull. These are incredibly efficient in creating living area per unit mass and ultimately would become a Dyson Swarm. I consider this inevitable. The second is you can do better than beaming power with orbital rings [2]. In short, you put a loop of conducting cables in orbit, run a current through them and float things on top with the magnetic field. The beauty of this is those things elevated on the ring are fixed to points on Earth. This means you don't need to speed up to Mach 30 to reach orbital speeds. If you have an orbital ring, you can run cables down from space directly to the ground. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-TISSvR0L4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-TISSvR0L4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E