Caltech's Space Solar Power Demonstrator Wirelessly Transmits Power in Space

But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact. The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower.

A recent report written for the UK government[1] estimates that the per megawatt of energy could get down to 62.50 USD, assuming that the system would run for 100 years--according to Sabine Hossenfelder[2] this would make it cheaper than Nuclear and more expensive than ground based Solar.

[1] https://www.fnc.co.uk/discover-frazer-nash/news/frazer-nash-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36177739

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZPrIE5ZMZA https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36177739

>MAPLE features two separate receiver arrays located about a foot away from the transmitter to receive the energy, convert it to direct current (DC) electricity, and use it to light up a pair of LEDs to demonstrate the full sequence of wireless energy transmission at a distance in space.

Ah.

They say 8x power generation compared to the same panel on the ground, due to cloud etc...

But they have to expend the energy to put this in orbit, then use the panel to convert sunlight to electricity, then convert that to microwaves, beam that through the atmosphere, then convert that back into electricity.

There are losses at each step.

This smells like you're going to struggle to make a net power gain, let alone make a profit. But they're definitely smarter than me and I'm sure they've run the numbers.

In the original RoboCop, didn’t the opening news broadcast describe an accident where directed energy from space accidentally missed its ground based collector?

Is there any prediction as to economic efficiency, even with Starship payloads?