I didn't mean to diss your post, I was just curious about the numbers. I've heard techies talk about beamed power from satellites, so I knew it wasn't unfeasable, I just wondered if anyone had thought it through all the way.

Let's try an admittedly oversimplified back-of-the-cocktail-napkin calculation. Assume a beamed power installation producing microwave power at the antenna comparable to a typical power plant (say, 1000 MW). Simplifying the problem for argument's sake, let's assume a square kilometer antenna which completely intercepts the beam. This gives a microwave energy flux of 1 kiloWatt per square meter at the antenna, or about 73% of the total solar flux at the top of Earth's atmosphere. My guess is it's probably close to the energy we would receive by standing outdoors at noon with the sun directly overhead. This probably isn't enough raw energy to hurt a bird or even an insect that momentarily intersects the beam. However, we are talking microwaves here, and I know next to nothing about how microwaves interact with living tissue, or how prone they are to scattering or absorption by the atmosphere.