I went into this thinking it'd be bunk but Slava Turyshev definitely knows what he's talking about. His articles on what it'd take to actually resolve an image of an exoplanet using a solar gravitational focus, and why it mostly won't work, are still defining the edges of the field. Which is kind of why the idea of actual power transmission seems so outlandish here. Just sending or receiving information is hard enough but actual power? The catch is that you already have to have the spacecraft positioned extremely accurately hundreds of AU on the others side of the other star system to have a chance of receiving the power. It's not going to power you on the way there.
The tldr is that you have two stars, the sun and some other star. And you already have some spacecraft in the other system positioned with an accuracy of +-100m along the straight line between it and the sun and the conical array of lasers back out 650 AU+ from the sun in our system. Those lasers illuminate a ring around the solar gravitational lens at an optical wavelength that won't get defocused by a star's corona like radio does.
At 650 au the local star is going to be pretty dim. For our sun, 422,500 times dimmer than at Earth. That's dimmer than night with a full moon. Solar power would be about 3 milliwatts per square meter.
If you're setting up an interstellar communication network, it might make sense to have one really built up solar system (presumably ours) where you have all the massive infrastructure for power production, and then rather low mass transceivers in distant solar systems with little or no infrastructure can still function.
