Solarpunk

Short- and medium-term, anything that leads away from fossil fuel is a good thing. Long-term, though, it seems like taking energy that would normally have bypassed the Earth, capturing it, and then adding it into our ecosystem is probably a bad idea. I'm a total layman, here, though, mostly going off of what I've read in science fiction.

Also, yeah, the weapons potential is a problem, though I sort of feel like we've already got all the weapons we need to intentionally eliminate human life, so further refinements don't matter much. It's the accidental extermination we're worried about, and this might help with that for awhile.

We still have plenty of space down here where we could put solar-panels and I doubt the efficiency gains from space based solar PV will ever make up for the difficulties in getting them up there and beaming the energy back down.

And I am a little suspicious that this will be turned into weapon technology as the potential for that is certainly there.

Space based solar power is going to be a lot more expensive than ground based solar power.

The issues that it solve are distribution and night time production. I think we can solve those with a combination of various types of renewables and storage in a much cheaper way if we really wanted to.

It's an interesting technology but it's way too expensive and it might have unknown consequences. Like the other poster said, I also don't think it's a great idea to add massive amounts of energy from space to earth. It would probably be better than fossils that we dig out of the ground and turn into energy, but it's still introduce energy and thereby heat into our atmosphere.

I don't know if it will be great for actually helping out with the climate crisis, but there's probably a lot of asteroids, moons and other stuff out there in space which we may come to need in the future, and effective space travel and navigation would be preferable so that when or if that time comes, we don't wind up like the aliens in the District 9 movie.

Using solar and lithium storage to power a space station could allow energy usage for running heavy machinery in a confined space. Think of the Vikings, leverage, rudders and rowboats.

well if it was a 1:1 replacement with zero growth it will be fine;

The problem is the goal economy is structured around a 10% per year (compounding) growth rate in energy use; which means we have a rather short doubling time. And it only takes 120 doubling before we exceed the total energy of the sun and long before that the Earth would be hotter than the surface of the Sun. (Even if we removed 100% of all green house gases and blocked out the Sun entirely and distributed pure electricity only)

That being said if we build a Dyson Sphere and do some Star lifting to convert it to a white dwarf star https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U

and cut our growth rate significantly, we might be able to have a civilization of growth for about a billion years.