Green
Green
1: The green movement is not a solution to the energy problem, at best it's a patch, at worst its a lot of resources thrown away. Keep in mind that all these controllers and sensors and what not takes energy to produce and install and I'm somewhat skeptical about their efficiency. I'm not skeptical about the energy it COULD save, but the energy it ACTUALLY saves. The problem is these systems need maintenance, sensors need replacing. I've seen way too many times buildings where the AC's and light where bypassed because the EMS failed and no one fixed it. On the other hand putting a break on economic growth will put a break on technology progress as well.
2: The hydro power is a great resource for some of the energy, but it's limited and it does create enviromental issues, not to mention it's wide open to terrorism.
3: I'm not crazy at all with wind energy, bulky, unreliable, takes too much space to really mean something.
4: Solar power does seem like a good resource, however at this point it takes way too much space, too costly and somewhat unreliable. If the future would be in solar power I think it'd more toward having satellites harnessing the energy and sending it down via lasers.
These are the areas which I believe we should concentrate to resolve the energy problem.
1: Atomic energy. And I'm not talking today's nuclear plants. Too much irradiated material left over. The nuclear plants of today actually heat water to produce energy. I'm talking about controlling the energy that's released thru fusion. We can not do it right now, but supposingly couple grams could run a house for a few thousands years. This might be way far down the road.
2: Wave movement. This is something that surprisingly is not much thought of. Think about it, even a calm area has a movement of least half a foot or so every 2-3 seconds. Even 4 inches gives you around 200,000 TONS of lift every 2-3 seconds for just a square mile area that's a lot more that the wind delivers and is a lot more reliable. This is readily available. Still this is not something that will make the future unless we plan to cover the entire oceans with platforms.
3: Last, my favorite: Hydrogen, high thermal coefficient, clean burning and literally unlimited. I really believe this is where the world should concentrate on. Right now it's too expensive to separate it from water and it's easy to understand why, at best you'll get back the energy it took to separate. So I don't think we'll ever have cars which we'll just pour a gallon of water in the tank. However combined with the atomic energy maybe we can figure out a way to control that energy just enough to separate mass amounts of Hydrogen from water.