[noodle]

Barone1551, you make some good points, but I don't think you think things through properly... You've looked at the positives, but haven't considered the negatives much.

Yes, there are maintenance costs if you set up solar panels in the desert, and yes they would collect less energy than if they were in space (and btw, it's roughly 1.3 times more at any given time, not twice) and yes you can talk about the limited time of solar exposure etc etc. BUT and this is a big BUT, maintenance costs are far far less than those in space... You gave dust and wind as an example of damage to panels in the desert. In space, you have solar flares. It's very very hard to keep sudden surges of energy under control without at least one piece of a machine going bust (usually a fuse).

Getting past this problem is very tricky, and if unable to get past this, to maintain and replaces a fuse (being simplistic I know... and if you know your stuff, you're prob wondering if i know anything about circuit breakers... even those are troublesome and would not be without maintenance costs), it will cost A LOT more than cleaning a solar panel... (which you don't actually have to do, because you can easily put the panels in some sort of greenhouse lol... The only maintenance costs there is cleaning the windows which doesn't cost too much as you can see by the buildings in Dubai, Doha and all rich middle eastern countries.

The only time I'd agree that this is a good idea is the day that we are able to have cities in space... At the moment, this is a huge waste of resources, hence why the US hasn't gone up there yet (check out SBSP and SERT). They've been talking about this since the 60's I think.

The simple fact is, Japan is trying to jump forward rather than go at it slowly. e.g. to beam down the energy, there is only a certain frequency you can use, and this frequency will more likely than not be slowed down by our ozone which in turn reduces the amount of energy and potentially damages the ozone due to concentrated amounts of energy on one spot (unlikely, but theoretically true as far as I know)