"Anybody else see this CSPAN broadcast?"

Yeah, I happenned to see it.
I thought Buzz's "version of Shuttle C" somewhat interesting- main thing it is fairly attactive from a NASA prospective.

I was disappointed at the response to that person from the Energy Dept.
I think harvesting solar energy from space is a main reason of why we should be interested in space. Obviously the cost of havesting energy from Space at this particular point in time is too expensive- as the person from the Energy dept said it's at least currently 3 order of magnitude too high to ship to Earth use.
The typical NASA solution of spending a lot money on some huge mega project to "somehow" lower the cost just won't work.
My solution is would be develop a market for electrical power in space which over decades of time would mature to the point of having the price low enough to sell to the Earth surface. So in the beginning electrical power would be a higher price in space- currently the price works out to be around $100 per kwh- if you separately calculate to total cost of putting a solar panel in space compared to the energy you get from it over the lifetime of the satellite. If you were to solve how you could electrical power in space to somewhere around $10 per kwh you could providing power at a lower cost than is currently available.
An example is that currently NASA charges $2000 per additional kwh a customer might need for their experiment- obviously if you could sell that customer a lower price for same electrical power than the customer could decide to buy it from you- the more power usage needed the more significant a lower cost.
One user of electrical power are communication satellites- they use about 10 kw per bird. And it's probable that if you provide more power then the sat maker could use more power (at design stage of project). In other words if you were to offer constant power at say 40 kw at say less than $50 per kw- you might find these sat maker would be interested in buying this power. Another point of value would be if you could provide flexible amount of power (with customer buying that amount required) then this would have additional value.
Imagine possiblities if there was the capablity of having as much electrical power as you needed anywhere in space (or Earth). For instance Ion rocket require a lot of electical power, if you could beam microwave energy (which can be converted or used as microwave energy) then this would change how you got payloads to GEO or beyond- paying $100 per kwh would very CHEAP if you just wanted the power for a couple days or less.