Putting cells over the area: You get intermittent power. Putting antennas over the area: You get continuous power. And that's the achillies heel of solar--you can't have things shutting down every time a cloud comes over.
Furthermore, microwave antennas are mesh, not solid. You won't have full sun under it, but neither will it be dark.
That being said, there's a fundamental issue here that without huge improvements in launch costs it's simply not viable unless made out of lunar materials.
And note that it doesn't have to be in a synchronous orbit so long as you permit some movement of the antennas. Put say 25 stations out there and 24 ground stations--they keep hopping to the next station as the Earth rotates underneath, the 25th station is offline because it's in shadow.
The real magic is not putting all the cells in one place. It's distributing them over the land mass.
A single solar power station can be taken out by a cloudy day.
A million little solar power stations spread across an continent average together into an even power source that provides power for longer than daylight hours.
There's a practical limit on how far you can ship power. Some while ago I tried to model what it would take to maintain continuous power worldwide with just looking at day/night. Nope, couldn't be done even if your cells were free. Just the wires became impossible--I was looking at the best wires to date and that still translated into a number of nines (I forget how many) on the loss percentage--and some mechanical bottlenecks were you simply didn't have enough land to run the wires.
The higher you run the voltage the more corona loss, the higher you run the current the more resistance loss. And there's a limit to how close you can put the wires to each other before they interfere. The band of land required for the massive power bus is gargantuan.
Furthermore, microwave antennas are mesh, not solid. You won't have full sun under it, but neither will it be dark.
That being said, there's a fundamental issue here that without huge improvements in launch costs it's simply not viable unless made out of lunar materials.
And note that it doesn't have to be in a synchronous orbit so long as you permit some movement of the antennas. Put say 25 stations out there and 24 ground stations--they keep hopping to the next station as the Earth rotates underneath, the 25th station is offline because it's in shadow.