[awillen]

It's in the second paragraph of the article: "The approach has several advantages over terrestrial solar power, including the absence of night and inclement weather and the lack of an atmosphere to attenuate the light from the sun."

[Ancalagon]

Armchair moment: I have a _really_ hard time believing there could ever be a cost-effective way to make space Solar worthwhile. For the price of one football-sized field of solar panels in space (which I’m guessing on the low end might be $5-10 billion? Probably more though) how many terrestrial solar plants 10x that size could you build? And how much battery capacity could you build to store it over night, eliminating the major advantage of space solar anyways

[panick21_]

Every study done on the concept basically show that its non viable unless you make some pretty extreme assumptions. And even then most of those studies are financial and don't take into account CO2 use form the rockets and other factors like limited launch site availability and so on.