Another one of those stories that endlessly repeats over decades and decades. To give you an example of how long this has been proposed a guy named Gerard O'Neill wrote a book about space stations that were going to be launched that were big cylinders that rotated that his Princeton students helped him devise and whose primary function was going to be giant solar panels in space which used microwave beams to direct that power back down to earth.

That was in the late 1970s. And even in the 1970s with that technology that seemed like one of those ideas that was well within the technology reach of the day if only somebody just decided to do it. So no improvements in solar technology or rocket technology have really done much more than make a practical system more practical today. But that's not why it won't ever get done. It won't ever get done because it's always going to be cheaper to have that power from the ground.