I'm not sure how practical that would be. Transmitting power over distances incurs losses.
I did see a proposal to build out solar in Africa and pipe it undersea to Europe. That seemed wild, and, predictably, it got canned for its impracticality.
Edit - it looks like there are several such proposals, and that they're not all cancelled:
> I did see a proposal to build out solar in Africa and pipe it undersea to Europe. That seemed wild, and, predictably, it got canned for its impracticality.
That doesn't seem _that_ wild? The Strait of Gibraltar is only about 15km wide. There are far longer HVDC undersea lines than that in Europe (longest is nearly 800km), and in China there's a 3,000km land-based HVDC line.
The real challenge here (besides the "it will be cheaper if you wait another year" problem that kinda haunts big solar/battery/HVDC projects at the moment; costs are falling fast enough that sometimes the economics are to wait) is political. Do we want to be in a situation where the European grid is dependent on, say, Algeria? Probably not; been there, done that with Russia.
I suspect a mix of batteries and baseload delivery from the sunny side will be helpful. Even a few more hours of daylight from across the country can help batteries "last longer" by shortening the demand period.
I feel like it would be more feasible than that to just put something in space and beam it down by laser/maser/whateber, that way it's outside the penumbra and can be in full light 24/7.
At risk of being annoying - getting solar panels to space is expensive. Even though you can make them very thin in space, optimistic estimates I've seen are around 1kg/kilowatt for just the panels, at some point in the future. (Current designs are closer to 10kg/kw). Once you add in the weight of the electronics & beam, I'm not sure it makes financial sense.
Last I've seen, it would cost (roughly) $5k per kilogram that you deliver to space. Local costs for rooftop solar that I've seen are around $3k per kilowatt - and that's after the cost of installation, including power hookups, etc.
Once you factor in the efficiency loss from beaming down the power (plus the cost of building the base stations, and the cost of manufacturing these awesome solar panels), I'm not sure that it makes economic sense.
You're right of course. It only makes any sense in this context because we're literally comparing it to building and maintaining undersea cables to the other side of the earth (and maybe not even then).
I did see a proposal to build out solar in Africa and pipe it undersea to Europe. That seemed wild, and, predictably, it got canned for its impracticality.
Edit - it looks like there are several such proposals, and that they're not all cancelled:
Several travel across the Mediterranean:
https://gregy-interconnector.gr/index_en.html
https://www.ecofinagency.com/news-industry/0210-49221-egypt-...
Here's the one I thought was cancelled, which travels along the western coast of Africa to the UK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
https://thenational-the-national-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/...