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My first reaction was that this was ridiculous, but on second thought the concept itself is not actually all that wrong. It simply relies on a very specific barrier that has not been overcome yet: Gravity. Industrial endeavors of any kind are all very heavy, and current launch methods are all horribly inefficient (the best currently is the Ariane 5 at a little under 39% payload/vehicle weight, but it's still more or less a one-use/disposable vehicle). So for industry of any scale the cost of actually getting the necessary equipment far outweighs, massively outweighs, dare I say it, even ASTRONOMICALLY outweighs any savings you'd have from doing the work in space with a Zero-G environment and 24-hour solar power available (both very real but not immense savings). There is a reason that the International Space Station is the single most expensive object ever created by mankind (at $157 billion it comes in at more than 6 times the cost of the #2 object, the Itaipu Dam).

That being said, if we can manage to get a cheap method of reacting orbit, the primary barrier would be circumvented and it would make all kinds of sense to migrate such things to orbit. As the OP suggested, energy is abundant (both from solar sources and from various theoretical designs of orbital tethers tapping electrostatic energy in the atmosphere or electrodynamic magnetic harvesting. At that point the Zero-G environment would make large scale industrial and manufacturing endeavors much easier, especially if you can accept the idea that by that time the bulk of the raw materials would be harvested from non-terrestrial sources like asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.

Currently the most promising concept on tap seems to be the Orbital Space Elevator. We have basically all the fundamental technologies required with the advent of Carbon Nanotubes (as opposed to more theoretical solutions involving gravity manipulation, for example). It has come down largely to a manufacturing challenge of creating the 22 mile cable required, when currently nothing longer than about one meter has been achieved.