But if you use a laser?
I imagine it will be easier to focus it more precisely?
We can examine this limit in the context of delivering energy to a remote object. This analysis will be simple - we assume that the optics are perfectly aligned (dubious - pointing is difficult); we assume nothing about the absorption properties of the object, which will necessarily need to be very high efficiency. The angular size T of a laser beam of wavelength L emitted by an aperture of diameter D_a is roughly L/D_a. Similarly, using the small angle approximation, this angular size T at the object itself will be the width of the beam, W, divided by the distance between the object and the aperture, D_o: T = W/D_o. Ultimately, this gives us the width: W = L*(D_o/D_a).
What does this tell us about the practicality of such a system? Visible light, wavelength roughly 500 nm, is perhaps a solid guess for a real system. Realistically the aperture size is probably limited to about 10 meters, but we can go even further and assume a synthesized aperture of a realistic system being 100 meters. You would want to get all of your beam for power transmission, so lets assume an upper limit for the beam width at the object to be 100 meters as well - probably unrealistic, but maybe solar sail/ultralight absorbers could get there. Throwing these numbers in gives a maximum range of... 2x10^10 meters. This is roughly a tenth of an AU. In comparison, this is about 50 Earth-Moon distances... and only a quarter of the distance between Earth and Mars at their closest approach. Coincidentally, this is also about one light-minute.
Any real power delivery system, using current tech and without assuming convenient fictions, will have a much more limited range. In short, lasers are not really perfect rays, even though they are approximately so over scales we typically encounter; at astronomical scale, diffraction always wins. This is why it is usually way better to bring the power with you - especially as you lose solar irradiance as you get further from the Sun. And for bringing power with you, nothing beats nuclear for energy density.
(also memorys of phsyik lectures are coming up again)
And forgive a nonserious reply:
"And for bringing power with you, nothing beats nuclear for energy density"
I think fusion does ...
anyway, yes sure fusion is nuclear power, I just read in your comment nuclear fission which you did not wrote ... so never mind I am just tired at some airport ...