[flareback]

I always wonder about the health effects of beaming energy to earth on the people near the beam. What keeps the beam narrow to the just the intended collection point? The article states it's microwaves and that doesn't sound healthy to be bombarded by microwaves. Is there something here that I'm missing about how they're transmitting the energy?

[hedora]

They claim it will be such a wide beam that it won't matter (multiple square miles of beam per city).

I haven't done the math, but it sounds wrong to me too. It would be nice if they provided actual wattage in the same units that are currently used for consumer devices, like cell phones.

[Schroedingersat]

Microwaves are fairly harmless, I'd be more worried about disrupting the ozone layer or other weird climate effects.

You manage the beam intensity by having the collection area and the exclusion zone around the collection area be so large that the whole thing is entirely pointless and you could just use regular PV and concentrating solar.