Solar farms in space might beam electricity to Earth

Wow ... thirty years. That's the engineering document equivalent of "if I say 5 million they will stop asking"

>>> political, legal, regulatory and environmental impacts ...

Wow. That's, that's all the impacts. At once.

>>> 5km

Yeah they need a 5km diameter antenna to receive the whole beam. It spreads out a bit ...

Ok this surprised me - a lot. And frankly it's the kicker. If you are going to go to the trouble of laying out twenty square kilometres of "antenna" then... just stop with the whole satellite business and go with, you know, 20km2 of solar panels. I mean you get power after the first 1km2. And you don't have to have a satellite launch.

Or "turn off the power if another satellite crosses below your beam." Starlink anyone? Yeah seriously this will fry every LEO satellite and the plan is to turn off the beams as they cut across. Turn off what is labelled "base load" electricity, for a whole nation.

Sorry your hospital will go dark for thirty seconds. And again. Oh again. And again.

Aaargh. I am channelling Adam Something at this point. Trains. We could put trains in the 20km2 as well.

Ok - more seriously thank you @timthorn for the paper - sorry for not taking it as seriously as I should. But thank you - worth the skim read.

Edit: clearly I am not a physicist but I am wondering what does a satellite that is designed to collect 3GW of power from the Sun constantly actually do with the power of it is going to "turn off" the beam. I mean, could you really turn all the mirrors and panels away from the sun and back again reliably? Or do you keep the power flowing and pour the beam elsewhere ? (which sounds like you are actually frying a slice of the earth as you aim away. and hitting those satellites in the way. Oh wow this is complicated.