[imdsm]

Does this mean that if you go towards the sun, you would be able to generate more solar electricity with less surface area? I'm not thinking dyson sphere style, but perhaps some sort of electricity space-tanker, that sails toward (or around?) the sun, collecting solar energy, and then returns to earth with batteries packed to the brim with energy?

Dibs on Solar Harvester

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, it means exactly that - though soon you'll start hitting into issues with solar panel efficiency and thermal management. It's very hard to keep things cool in space.

The space electricity tanker idea is theoretically possible, but might not make any economical sense. For it to be worth it, it would have to store a lot of energy, so that it could ship back more than the cost of moving it around, while also being competitive with simply building more bigger collectors further away (and closer to the industry). But maybe a highly eccentric orbit, with a very low perihelion, would work.

Not totally sure if the math works out on this, but I could see moving the energy-intensive industry closer to the Sun, and having it use beamed energy to move resources and products to itself and back.

[InclinedPlane]

Take a look at the solar panels on the Parker Solar Probe: http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/index.php#spacecraft