It is through one coil in the vacuum of space where you can only radiate away heat. It’s a lot. Spread out over a big city it’s not that much. From a article estimating power consumption of cities,”…A safe number for and industrialized city of 1 million would be 10,000 MWh…” So it’s the power of a city of roughly 400,000 people in one small space in one big ass coil of wire.

Settling Mars is just silly. To do so you will have to move a great deal of dirt and process a great deal of material. Why not just do it on the Moon, magnetically launch it into space and build space habitats of vast size. I’m willing to bet the material requirements would similar and since the habitats are solar powered once you build them they mostly sustain themselves. One design was so big they estimated to see every space in it on foot would take a person most all of their life. One technique might to build some sort of AI to design different areas in different styles but have them generally follow the rules of design to make them pleasing to look at.

A McKendree cylinder made of steel, of which there’s a vast amount in asteroids could be the living area of Russia. Made of carbon nano-tubes the living area would be the size of Euro-Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder

Smaller habitats could be built where people could live while these bigger ones are built. Most of this stuff would take a good deal of working out to get it online but after that a lot of the work could be automated.

Really big ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Ring_%28habitat%29

Allow 50% engineering margin, and we’re looking at an array 3 km square. That’s not bad. By comparison Germany has got 41 GW installed capacity, which at German ground level irradiance and efficiency of ~200W/m2 must be about 200 Million square metres.

For a civilizational-scale endeavour, it seems very possible.

I still say that some sort of statite would be a better answer. [A statite is a satellite over the north and/or south pole of a planet that balances it's gravitational pull down to the planet with a solar sail or other such propulsion. Maybe it could use electric fields to do some of the propulsion.] 400Mwatts is a shit load of power. Think of the radiator size needed to dissipate the power of this thing. Yuge…I think you would need something bigger and use a super conducting magnet.

Could this be done cheaper with a constellation of smaller satellites rather than a single large one? They don’t have to be at L1, do they?