Greg, well, I thought of that, too. Remember the experiemental setup in the SW a couple decades ago where steerable mirrors were set up to reflect great quantities of sunlight onto a tower where some way to harvest the heat was set up, not EV panels, but if my feeble brain cells recall, even molten sodium like inside some power plants?
There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, of birds flying along and getting near the focal point and bursting into roast squab in a hurry.
I'm not sure how solar panels are made and if the chemistry/physics behind them mean they are about at their maximum for just incoming solar radiation, or there is a long ways to go if you could get brighter light on it. I know the 1400 watts/meter/meter is, again if I recall correctly, the incident value at the upper atmosphere. I wonder if they use different solar panels on spacecraft where higher intensity and a different bandwidth of energy hits them, without atmospheric attenuation.
I have a couple of the little solar panels that are supposed to be used to keep car batteries charged when they are parked for awhile. I might try to set up a little volt/ammeter test to see what shining a refection from a piece of cardboard wrapped in tinfoil would do.
