Umbra length is about 10x diameter (was GEO already has 295 commercial satelli)

The umbra of any solar power station would be negligible for all
practical purposes; people in the Earth surface covered by the
so-called "umbra" would have to take a photograph of the sun in order
to see the minuscule dot of the SPS against the solar disk.

You are making analogies with an eclipse but it would instead be like
a transit event - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_transit -
when an object of negligible diameter relatively to the distance and
the diameter of the main body passes in front of it. However in the
case of a SPS it would be a really, really tiny dot in oposition to
the transits of natural objects depicted in the link.

On 3/5/09, hitssquad wrote: