Here’s an overview of the state of the art of needed technologies to beam power to earth, from almost three decades ago, when I was working at Rockwell. I ran across it in trying to reduce the entropy of my office. It’s funny how little has changed.
Sorry about the rotation; that’s how it scanned into the PDF. Just rotate it with your browser.
The Republicans should be able to take advantage of this, with a pitch to the Hispanics and blacks, but they won’t. But if Trump were to campaign in CA, it could help a lot.
These can be done pretty quickly and cheaply, both because the cost of access has dropped, and because the customer actually wants them, not a jobs program. ISS has warped our notions of what space stations have to cost and how long they should take to build as much as Apollo has about how much going to the moon has to cost.