ITU names the bands for power beaming. That is not permission.
ITU-R published a new edition of Report SM.2392, "Applications of wireless power transmission via radio frequency beam", dated June 2026. It supersedes the 2021 edition. A five-year gap usually means a substantive revision rather than an editorial one, and this one is substantive: Section 5 addresses spectrum for RF-beam wireless power transfer, and Section 2.9 is titled "Space based solar power via satellite".
Section 5 names 915 MHz, 2.45 GHz, 5.8 GHz and 24 GHz as the bands used for RF-beam power transfer, and observes that 2.45 GHz is more desirable than the higher bands because propagation impairments are smaller.
For anyone working on power beaming this is a genuinely useful document. It is the ITU's own text describing the application, and until now much of the frequency discussion in this field cited nothing at all.
What it is not
It is a Report. Reports are not Recommendations. A Recommendation is a technical standard that other instruments incorporate by reference; a Report describes a state of affairs. SM.2392 recommends nothing and binds nothing.
That distinction is the entire content of this edition, and it is going to be misread. The tempting inference — ITU has named 5.8 GHz for space-based solar power, therefore 5.8 GHz is available for space-to-Earth power beaming — does not follow, and it is worth being blunt about why.
5.8 GHz sits in an ISM band. The Radio Regulations carry no Article 21 space-to-Earth power-flux-density row for it, and the Radio Regulations do not contemplate a space station transmitting at these power levels into it. A Report naming the band as the one the field uses is a description of engineering practice. It is not a spectrum allocation, it is not a change to Article 21, and nobody should build a regulatory assumption on it.
We filed it in our own standards registry as vocabulary — a document we cite for its terms, not one we execute — and left our Article 21 caveat standing unchanged.
The narrower point about corroboration
Section 2.9 describes a geostationary system. Most published work on beamed power at scale is GEO, and ground-footprint figures follow from aperture and range.
So if you fly in low Earth orbit and one of ITU's stated areas happens to match a number in your own model, that agreement is a coincidence of scale across a link two orders of magnitude different in range. It is not the ITU validating the LEO case. Take the citation for what it covers and no further.
Where to read it
One related document worth ruling out explicitly: ITU-R SM.2151 is the Recommendation on frequency ranges for RF-beam wireless power transfer, and would be the load-bearing instrument if it applied. It does not. Its title scopes it to mobile and portable devices and sensor networks, it has not been revised since 2022, and it says nothing about space-to-Earth power.
Also checked this week and unchanged: all six ITU-R propagation recommendations we cite, ICNIRP's 2020 RF guidelines, and IEEE Std C95.1-2019.