From the report: "a single kilometer-wide band of geosynchronous earth orbit experiences enough solar flux in one year to nearly equal the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today." Damn.
Yeah, but my first thought was, how are you going to get all that energy out of orbit through the atmosphere to the ground without losing most of it?
Granted, I skimmed the article for this little tidbit, and all I saw was that NASA said it was technically feasible, but not very economical.
I remember that E&M transmission through air lost power exponentially. Maybe when they say 'beam', they mean an actual light beam. The space elevator is powered by a laser aimed from the ground, so I suppose that's not entirely infeasible.
