L. Crane's scheme involves taking light energy from enormous solar panels and concentrating it into gamma rays. That is possible, but you run into scaling issues and limitation. Those gamma photons would have to have an energy in the TeV range, or equivalently the pulse needs a temperature of about 10^20K. Anything less will concentrate photons with too large a wavelength to do the trick. This means the shell which produces gamma rays would have to be a nearly continuous distribution of LHC energy scale lasers! In fact at a million metric tons, which would be the mass-energy of this grand pulse of gamma rays, this would require over a million billion billion times the beam flux (or imploding wave flux) of gamma rays than what the LHC delivers. This would be one hell of a machine!
Besides the solar arrays being large, consider the size of the energy storage system. it would have to hold a million metric tons in mass equivalent of energy. Clearly the storage system would be many orders of magnitude larger in mass. Then to pulse it right that energy would have to charge up a Marx bank or something. That would have to be utterly huge to prevent the colossal charge stored up from tearing it apart. Imagine the enormous size of this system! This thing would be the size of Ceres, or something comparable.
I would prefer th the winner had been someone who wrote about renormalization group and conformal scaling of fields with respect to black hole amplitudes in the sorts of physics we can do now. The Brookhaven Relativistic High-energy Ion Collider (RHIC), has found channel production for small amplitudes that are similar to what is expected for a black hole. So these experiments slam gold nuclei together in the GeV range. The protons and neutrons transition into a plasma of quarks the QCD gauge particles called gluons. This then give by AdS/CFT a soft black hole probability amplitude, and evidence for this is seen by the RHIC as indicated in the referenced paper here, and data corresponding to black hole physics has also been measured . So we may be seeing hints of this sort of physics.
I have frankly jaded opinions about mega-schemes and gigantic programs --- I prefer to see small or modest ideas and technologies which have some elegance to them. This idea is a sledgehammer, more in line with science fiction. Oh well, I suppose it is not completely out of line with ideas of space elevators. Congress is not going to authorize funding for either any time in the near future.
Cheers LC