The cloud cover begins at something like 60-80 miles altitude, and extends for a few hundred miles above that.<br /><br />You would need to orbit or float a solar powered baloonn above the cloud cover, and beam the power down with a microwave beam via masers. This would also necessitate a pretty good sized rectenna receiver on the ground. <br /><br />I would say it would be far more feasible to operate with a nuke plant that operates with a liquid metal coolant, like sodium, lead, etc.<br /><br />My personal preference is to station a large shade of solar cells in the Venus-Sun L1 point, large enough to cast a shadow over at least 50% of the dayside of the planet. Power generated would be split up: a small percent going into maser beams to surface probes and floating balloon stations. The rest would be used to beam power at Mars to help warm it up.<br /><br />Floating balloon stations would feed on CO2 in the atmosphere to build ballast of CNTs that would be used to build skyhooks. While some could be used for transportation, because of their thermal conductivity they could also be used to help cool Venus' atmosphere in a massive terraforming project, while at the same time sequestering CO2 out of the atmosphere. In particular, as additional older skyhooks are built, older ones would detach from the surface and drift into space, and could then be transported to Earth, the Moon, Mars, thus permanently removing that carbon from Venus.<br /><br />Venus currently has 92 Earth atmospheres. Orginally Earth had about 52 times what it has now, but most of it was sequestered by life into limestone. Since Venus never developed life, as it was too close to the Sun, it never got that help. Reducing Venus' atmosphere to somewhere around where Earth started off at, engineered life forms should be able to be introduced to take over the process from technological systems and accelerate the change given the exponential replication capabilities of biological systems.