Advanced Solar-Electric Energy: Part I

Technically, all the technologies I mention have already been deployed in space or have real-life working demonstrators. Concentrator solar panels have been used on Deep Space 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_1 and thermophotovoltaics are a well-understood technology.

The collector equipment is usually the component with the lightest mass per square meter: only a few grams or less. The more collector area we use (and higher solar concentration), the lower the average mass per square meter of the entire system.

Around Jupiter, we would be receiving 10% of the sunlight around Earth, around Saturn 1% and 0.1%.

1kW/kg is generally accepted as the minimum needed for rapid interplanetary travel. It is the performance required of a generator to power a VASIMR rocket to Mars in 39 days. This means a power and propulsion system can travel quickly around Jupiter if it had 10kW/kg, around Saturn at 100kW/kg and Neptune at 1MW/kg. Currently, solar electric systems are unable to produce this level of power density, so they would become incredibly underpowered in the outer solar system. With the designs I suggest, travel around Saturn and even Neptune under solar power is possible using the advanced designs I described.

The reason solar-electric power is considered weak today is because it struggles to reach 100 to 300W/kg.

Quite right!

Making the solar collectors larger should not be a big problem, as they mass only a few grams per square meter while the rest of the system (solar cells, cooling ect) does not have to get more massive.

One application I will talk about in Part 2 is beamed power. Towering structures holding together several km^2 of parabolic reflectors can collect a lot of sunlight even in the outer solar system. It is converted into electricity by the solar-electric systems I am describing. This electricity can be used to power lasers to transmit that energy to other spacecraft. This means that you only need one big collector while all the rest of the spacecraft only uses a tiny laser dish to power its rockets.Advanced Solar-Electric Energy: Part I

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