For your entertainment and edification, I’m going to share with you some excerpts of my email correspondence with a friend on the topic of peak energy. I think we’ve reached the peak of oil production, our most important energy source, and if I’m right, production will decline in coming years, with disastrous implications for our way of life. He doubts that we’ve yet peaked, but in any case, he is confident that “somewhere in the next 10 years we will have a major technological breakthrough on a substitute for gasoline. . . . What usually happens in big technology disruptions is that someone makes a breakthrough — deliberate or accidental — that few people expected.”
I replied, “Just on the off chance that there’s no ‘major technological breakthrough,’ what’s the backup plan?”
Here’s his plan:
“The quick answer is [natural] gas, which we have in great abundance and ready to go. The larger answer is no one thing but a constellation of solutions:
–more [oil] exploration off the coasts mainly
–ANWR (I’m a great wilderness enthusiast and arctic enthusiast and I don’t buy the environmental impact argument)
–Brazilian ethanol (now embargoed in the US)
–hybrids
–nuclear power for electricity (clean and if places like France can handle the waste from getting over 50% of their power from nukes, so can we)
–fusion research
–clean coal (or much cleaner) We have centuries of energy in coal
–methane from landfills, animal wastes, and possibly the huge amounts on the sea floors”
I’m taking the editorial license to label his backup plan “A (shooting) gallery of alternative energy sources.” What follows is my response to his email, an attempt to shoot some holes in each of the above targets. I’ll even take aim at a couple of bonus targets that he didn’t mention:
“Estimates of natural gas reserves tend to be overly optimistic. Problem is, we’ve already extracted most of the easy-to-get-at natural gas in the U.S. Well decline rates are high, so we’re increasingly having to use hydrofracking to pump in water and chemicals (such as benzene). That does free up more gas, but there are limits to how long it will work, and in the meantime, there’s a great risk of polluting ground and surface fresh water sources. Canadian natural gas is our backup, but of course they have dibs on it. Shiploads of foreign LNG, currently providing about 3% of our gas, could not be counted on to provide the volumes consumed in the U.S. I’m less optimistic than you about natural gas as a solution we can count on.
Exploration for oil off the coasts may or may not find significant deposits. ANWR is estimated at about 10 billion barrels. That sounds significant until you do the math. If you could get it all out, which you can’t, and you could do so quickly, which you can’t, it would satisfy about 15-16 months of U.S. oil consumption, or about 4 months of world consumption. Oil reserves are being depleted faster than they’re being replaced. The economic downturn has reduced demand and masked this problem. I’m not optimistic about future oil production. I think the trend is downward.
Brazilian ethanol? Hardly worth mentioning. Even if we took every bit of their production, leaving them not a drop, it would provide less than 150 million barrels a year. Since ethanol delivers 25% less mileage than gasoline, the Brazilian production would replace only about 112 million barrels of oil, which is less than one week’s consumption in the U.S.
Hybrids? I have one. Let’s see, how much time and money, not to mention energy, would it take to swap out hybrids for the entire U.S. fleet of cars and trucks [250 million] equipped with internal combustion engines? It’s not going to happen in our lifetimes. And it doesn’t solve the problem of finite fuel sources; it just postpones it for awhile.
Nuclear power. If enough plants were built, they could certainly replace plants powered by gas, oil, and coal. But is it a realistic expectation that enough plants could be built? One study estimated that it would take 400 nuclear plants to replace just the coal-fired plants in the U.S. That’s nearly as many nuclear plants as there are in the whole world. Each plant costs $3 to $5 billion and takes years to build. If other countries also embarked on crash programs to build nuke plants, it would take about 8,000 plants to replace coal-fired plants worldwide. There’s nowhere near enough uranium to fuel 400 more U.S. plants, much less a few thousand more around the planet. And there is that problem of nuclear waste to deal with. The U.S. hasn’t even found a solution for the waste from its current plants. Where would we put the waste from hundreds more? Your faith in French waste disposal is not warranted. Their experience has been much like ours, in that their waste sites are full and they have had leakage into the environment. No country has come up with a satisfactory solution to nuclear waste.
Fusion research is just that. Research. Nothing to show for it yet.
Clean coal? Some say that’s an oxymoron. Centuries of energy? Maybe. Maybe not. As with other natural resources, estimates of reserves tend to be overstated, since most of the easy-to-get-at resource has already been extracted. It takes increasingly more money, time, and energy to keep extracting it, the quality goes down, and you can never get it all. We’re already at the stage of removing vast areas of surface and even leveling mountains to get at coal. The cost in money and environmental degradation is increasing rapidly. Even if we didn’t care about money or the environment, is it likely that we could scale-up production to the necessary levels? It takes a lot of coal to produce liquid fuel, about a ton for every couple of barrels. So we’d need over 10 million tons of coal a day, nearly 4 billion tons a year, to replace oil in the U.S. Even more to replace natural gas. Worldwide, we’d need 500 tons a second, about 16 billion tons a year, to replace oil. A lot more to also replace natural gas. [And using it up at that rate would reduce the estimates of a century's supply to mere decades.]
Methane from waste isn’t likely to be significant, but of course there’s plenty locked into frozen hydrates beneath the sea and in arctic tundra. This could be one of the better sources of fuel to replace oil and gas if we could figure out how to extract it for our uses. Of course, the concern among climate scientists is that these deposits are already melting and entering the atmosphere because of rising ocean and arctic temperatures. We could have a lot more methane from these sources to contend with than we want in coming years, in a form that accelerates global warming.
Each of the above could contribute towards meeting our energy needs in the future if we had a realistic and comprehensive energy plan, appropriately funded and prioritized. We don’t. It will probably take an energy emergency to focus our attention and get us moving. Problem is, if there’s an energy emergency, it would be the worst possible time to be attempting to build nuclear power plants, find oil and gas deposits and commence drilling, get serious about coal-to-gas, etc., etc.
And in the meantime, we just keep reproducing like rabbits. Nearly 7 billion of us right now (it was a third of that when you and I were kids), increasing to 8 billion, 9 billion and beyond in coming years. We’ve pretty much fished out and polluted our oceans. Arable land is decreasing every year. Fresh water is unavailable to hundreds of millions worldwide, as are dependable food supplies. The Earth’s finite natural resources are being depleted and its environment degraded. The greatest mass extinction of species in 65 million years is underway.” (Click here to read more about the multiple, simultaneous crises we face.)
BONUS ROUND
Curiously, my friend didn’t mention two much-hyped alternatives to oil-generated energy — solar and wind power. I’ll take these on as bonus shooting gallery targets:
Solar power has immense potential, with 970 trillion kilowatts of free energy provided by the Sun each day. But tapping into that resource to generate electrical power has been a challenge. Photovoltaic panels are expensive, and they typically operate at only 20% efficiency or less. All the solar panels in the world account for but 0.01% of worldwide power generation. One hundredth of one percent! Think of the investment in capital, time, and energy that would be required to multiply the world’s solar infrastructure by a factor of 100, so that it could contribute 1% toward meeting energy demands. Let’s dream big and imagine a crash program over the next decade to scale-up solar power by a factor of 1000. That would meet 10% of energy needs (not accounting for any growth over the decade). How would we satisfy the other 90% of needs? Also, keep in mind that solar could never replace oil for its non-energy uses — as a crucial ingredient in plastic, paint, fabric, floor covering, pharmaceuticals, asphalt, fertilizer, etc.
Wind power accounts for about 25 Gigawatts (GW) of capacity in the U.S. and about 94 GW worldwide. The latter is less than 0.01% of the 16 Terawatt (TW) worldwide consumption. As with solar, even a ten-year crash program to increase the infrastructure of wind-generated electricity a thousandfold, which is highly unlikely, would meet only 10% of demand (not accounting for growth over the decade). And as with solar, wind power could never replace oil for its non-energy uses.
The above backup plan, even if it could be implemented in time, would leave us far short of satisfying the energy demands of our civilization during the post-peak oil decline. There is no known substitute, nor a combination of substitutes of which I am aware, for the thirty-odd billion barrels of oil consumed by our civilization each year. As oil becomes less available and more expensive, we will be forced to make some drastic adjustments to our way of life.
Did I hit anything?
UPDATE: I listen to Car Talk on NPR Saturday mornings, and a caller on a recent show identified himself as a physicist at Princeton University. The Magliozzi brothers teased the caller unmercifully over the billions spent on fusion research at Princeton over decades with nothing to show for it. Finally Tom (or was it his brother Ray?) asked when we could expect a fusion breakthrough. “Forty years from now,” the caller said, “or maybe thirty.” The brothers then said something to the effect that the caller would probably be dead by then, after his entire professional life had been a failure. Ouch. They almost pulled off the bit with their usual playfulness and laughter, but underneath the comedy was the bitter truth. Science is not all about breakthroughs and success. There’s a lot of failure along the way. When it comes to meeting the energy needs of our ever-growing civilization, if production of oil, gas, or coal is interrupted or declines, we may not have thirty or forty years to wait for a breakthrough replacement.
UPDATE2: Hybrid and all-electric vehicles, photovoltaic panels, and other green-power technology requires rare earth elements (REEs) that may not be available in quantities needed for crash programs to replace oil, gas, and coal power. In addition to well-publicized limits to lithium production, deposits of REEs such as neodymium, thulium, lutetium, and other elements essential for green technology are concentrated in relatively few locations on our planet, limited in quantity, and in some cases can only be extracted at significant cost in dollars and damage to the environment. The latter calls into question use of the adjective “green” in describing some technologies. The former calls into question whether “green” technologies can be counted on as alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.
No one can tell when and what might fail in the present energy mix or proposed alternatives. However, we should note that all of the negatives you cite are very similar to the doomsday negatives that have been cited for centuries.
Example: “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines,” by William Stanley Jevons, 1865. (England) “The conclusion is inevitable that our present happy progressive condition is a thing of limited duration.” He predicted England’s coal supplies would be used up quickly by the expanding population of the prosperous Victorian era.
Example: 1926 Oil To Run Out in 1933
In 1926 the Federal Oil Conservation Board announced that the United States would run out of oil in seven years.
One could go on and on with similar predictions.
Citing a past or present problem is very little, if any, help in creating or imagining solutions.
As you say about “green” solutions, the analysis does sometimes help us avoid unintended consequences or eliminate unproductive paths.
When you list all the problems with the various possible sources of energy, you conclude there is no alternative “I am aware of”. That’s exactly the point. We are seldom aware of the game changing events and technologies that have kept the quality of life constantly improving for our species for at least 10,000 years.
The most frightening thing you propose is, “Each of the above could contribute towards meeting our energy needs in the future if we had a realistic and comprehensive energy plan, appropriately funded and prioritized.”
In other words, rather than having millions of entrepreneurs and thousands of scientists with the freedom to search for solutions, you seem to prefer a handful of politicians who know nothing of science and little of economics decide where we should put our financial and intellectual resources.
Central planning has been a huge failure and a great burden on creativity for thousands of years.
It is good for waging war, occasionally good at national defense but pretty inefficient and often a failure at most other things.
A quick follow up. I don’t mean that government should have no energy policy, but let it’s plan be to liberate as many problem solvers as possible, rather than trying to harness them to a plan conceived by politicians, loaded with the inevitable favors to their powerful constituent groups, skewed with payoffs for crucial votes, and diluted with necessary political compromises.
One can say of every government plan and proposal exactly what you say of each of the proposed sources of energy–insufficient.
To test this reality test some of the concrete measures that would fit your two solutions:
1. What would be the elements of a government plan?
2. What “drastic adjustments to our way of life” do you propose?
We are much more likely to create clean coal and extract sufficient gas for a century than we are to make any of the “drastic adjustments” you might suggest.
I am not predicting doom. I am predicting the end of boom (boom – noun: a period of great prosperity or rapid economic growth). There’s a difference. I believe that our civilization has peaked, and we are already experiencing the early phase of its decline. That’s likely to take awhile, probably longer than you or I will be around to witness. But our children and grandchildren may not enjoy the kind of lives we have been fortunate to live.
You cite past predictions that were wrong in an attempt to prove that today’s predictions will also be wrong. That argument is, of course, a logical fallacy (argument from prior error, a form of ad hominem). When each prediction regarding depletion of energy resources is evaluated individually, based upon its own merits, some will be found to be correct. For example, in 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted that oil production in the continental U.S. would peak around 1970 and decline thereafter. Previous incorrect predictions by others did not prevent him from being absolutely correct with his. Today, many within and outside the oil industry doubt that industry estimates of oil reserves are accurate, note that most major oil fields are already in decline (despite hydrofracking and other desperate measures), and are concerned that discoveries and new fields coming online will not be able to sustain current worldwide production levels, much less meet expected increases in demand. It is not prudent to discount such concerns without evaluating them carefully.
Regarding those “game changing events and technologies that have kept the quality of life constantly improving for our species for at least 10,000 years,” unfortunately, many of them have all but guaranteed that our species will struggle for existence in the future, along with the remaining species on the planet–all of us at risk during the ongoing sixth mass extinction, the greatest experienced by the Earth in 65 million years. Remarkably, most humans go about their business every day blithely unaware that 80 or more species became extinct that very day, 30,000 or more in the last year, directly or indirectly as a result of those “game changing events and technologies.”
Let’s review some of them:
– factory fishing, that efficiently sweeps the oceans clean of one species after another
– factory farming, that consumes enough crops and water to sustain many humans to produce meat that feeds far fewer humans and creates vast quantities of toxic waste to contaminate fresh water
– industrial agriculture, whose monoculture, chemical additives, and mechanization degrade and erode topsoil, reduce biodiversity, increase risk of crop disease, pollute fresh water, and destroy small farming as a sustainable way of life
– genetically modified crops, that contaminate native plant life and conventional crops, reduce biodiversity, and increase the risk of widespread crop loss from resistant pathogens and insects
– open-pit, strip, and mountain top removal mining, that leave in their wake massive destruction of terrain and natural habitat and contaminate fresh water
– center pivot irrigation, that depletes aquifers thousands of years in the making
– nuclear power, that leaves radioactive waste to endanger life for tens of thousands of years
– antibiotic overuse, from cattle feed additives to unnecessary prescriptions, that creates drug-resistant super germs
– fossil fuel overuse, that pollutes the atmosphere, raises mean temperatures, melts glaciers, displaces and kills living organisms, increases the risk of runaway global warming, and fritters away energy resources that can never be replaced
How much more of this sort of “improvement” can we take? What kind of planet are we leaving to our children and grandchildren? Hundreds of millions of humans already subsist without secure food or fresh water supplies. Many of them live in countries whose natural resources have been expropriated by developed nations for their use in improving the lives of citizens back home, people who give little thought to how those resources were obtained. For example, the U.S., with 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes 25 percent of the world’s resources, to perpetuate the “American Way of Life.” But what is life like in the countries from which we obtained those resources? Most Americans don’t know and don’t care.
I agree that “central planning” is not the answer to every problem, but the scope of some matters facing us is beyond individuals to solve alone. You mentioned defense and war as examples. Among others I would add are police, fire, EMS; streets, roads, and highways; airports and air traffic control; water, sewers and sanitation systems; public health and environmental protection; and energy generation and distribution. Although I’m certainly not against the idea of people generating their own energy, if we’re talking about an entire country weaning itself from its dependency on fossil fuels in a matter of decades, it is naive to think that this could occur without planning and allocation of financial, human, and material resources at the national level. The efforts of entrepreneurs and scientists would be crucial, but an “every man for himself” approach would get us nowhere. That said, I am not hopeful that either my favored approach or yours can solve a problem that involves depletion of non-renewable natural resources. Humans consume resources and reproduce with little thought of the future. It is our nature to destroy Nature.
The stakes are high. In the words of Sir Fred Hoyle, “It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.”
Wow, very thought provoking but could you guys get a ROOM!
Yeah, we’ve made our positions abundantly clear, so enough already. I’m moving on to my next post.
In your article above when you refer to solar power you only mention solar PV (solar panels), as if suggesting that is the only type, which it is not..
Solar thermal power has been around since 1913 when the world’s first
commercial plant was opened.
Solar thermal power uses mirrors or lenses to focus the sun’s rays to heat water in pipes and then turn it into steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. This type of power generation is also known as ‘CSP’ (Concentrated Solar Power).
Instead of water, the heated fluid medium pipes can also be oil or molten salt. After heating the hot oil or molten salt simply pass through a heat exchanger to turn water into steam and again drive electricity generators. Molten salt can also be stored in underground containers during the day and then pumped back up at nighttime and so thus generate electricity 24 hours a day, not just when the sun is shining, as with solar panels (solar PV).
There are commercial solar thermal power plants generating electricity in the Mojave Desert in California today which have been there since the 1980s’ and which are still going strong.
One article on this type of solar electricity generation is in the link
below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/business/06solar.html
Using just 10% of Federal lands in Nevada for this type of electricity
generation would produce enough electricity to supply the ENTIRE United States electricity consumption! Add another 30%-40%, and this generation capacity could supply electricity for high speed trains across the nation (as found in Europe, Japan etc), millions of plug-in hybrid electric cars and trucks, and even for recharging compressed-air cars and trucks (which exist today only in prototype form). The investment required to produce all this new electric generation capacity and distribution would be about $1.5-$2trln. This is real money, but is still LESS than the bank bailout and TARP monies which was just spent on paper shuffling and propping up
overweight bankers. This would be REAL money spent on a REAL energy solution which would make America energy independent FOREVER (sunshine permitting).
This electric generation concept would take the United States off all coal, oil and nuclear power generation permanently, would stop all the associated Greenhouse Gas pollution in its tracks and create millions of construction jobs in the process. Now of course there are hundreds or thousands of Special Interests from the coal and other industries which would fight this new power concept tooth and nail, but just I wanted to make sure everybody understands that this concept can work, and is working today. There is probably also reluctance from big industrial companies to scale up solar thermal power production, because it is a known and tested technology, and so will create fewer new patents from which to “cream off” large royalties.
The concept of generating power from deserts is also known as ‘Desertec’. This power generation mode is being promoted worldwide, with new solar thermal plants being built in Spain, Abu Dhabi, California and elsewhere.
Examples of solar thermal generation projects and companies are seen below:
http://www.esolar.com/
http://www.brightsourceenergy.com
http://www.ausra.com
Power companies such as Southern California Edison are now contracting with Thermal Solar companies to provide renewable power to supply their grid.
If just 1% of the world’s deserts was used for solar thermal power
production, ALL the world’s electricity needs would be met. 90% of the
world’s population lives within 1,700 miles of a desert, and could be
supplied with solar thermal electricity from there. 1,700 miles is within good limits for low loss transmission using HVDC power lines, and even sending electricity from Nevada to Massachusetts using this method would only give losses in the 5-10% range.
A few links with more information on the Desertec concept are below:
http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/index.htm
http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/csp.htm
http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/csp/costs.htm
http://www.desertec.org/
————-
Sidenote
Also, a great book to read on the last 2,500 years of use of solar heating and cooling going back to the Greeks and Romans is:
A Golden Thread – Twenty Five Hundred Years of Solar Architecture and Technology by John Perlin and Ken Butti
http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Thread-Twentyfive-Architecture-Technology/dp/0917352084/
This book truly is a masterpiece, and fills you in on a lot of what has been tried throughout the generations, what is and what is not possible.
This a very interesting concept, and I am going to take some time to research it and think through the implications. But here are some preliminary comments:
As with all alternative power generation technologies, there are significant challenges to concentrated solar power (CSP) as a centralized source of electricity at the level of countries, regions, continents, or beyond.
Finances: If I understand your estimate, it would cost upwards of $2 trillion for the U.S. That level of investment is beyond Goldman Sachs and its ilk, so taxpayers would have to provide the funds. You say that it’s less than TARP and the other bailouts, but the problem is that we already have to pay for all that and more. The country is broke. Worse than broke. Deeper in debt than any country in history. So before the people and the politicians would reallocate the nation’s scarce financial resources to this one huge project, they’d probably have to be facing an energy crisis.
Resources: Let’s say there was a crisis, such as a significant and long-term reduction in oil supplies, caused by production shortfalls, terrorism, or war. Wouldn’t that be the worst possible situation in which to attempt to harness the immense resources in energy and materiel and manpower for a $2 trillion crash construction project in the desert? Indeed, even under the best of circumstances, is the actual CSP hardware — the parabolic mirrors, the motion control devices, the tubing, the turbines, the transformers, and so on — available in the quantities necessary for such a project?
Timeframe: Of course, the hardware would have to be manufactured specifically for this project, but by whom? How long would it take to develop RFP’s, evaluate bids, select contractors, tool up, hire and train workers, and actually manufacture the hardware? Then how long would it take to construct a CSP facility on the scale of HUNDREDS OF SQUARE MILES? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty?
I dare say there are only two countries in the world capable of taking on such a project, the US and China, and the latter is more likely to be able to pull it off in a timeframe that makes it viable as an alternative to oil.
By the way, I found that “Desertec” is more than a generic term for large-scale CSP. It’s the name of a foundation whose goal is to develop a “sustainable supply of electricity for Europe (EU), the Middle East (ME) and North Africa (NA),” which will require “close cooperation between EU and MENA for market introduction . . . and interconnection of electricity grids by high-voltage direct-current transmission.” Please. If it’s going to take close cooperation between those countries, peoples, politicians, religions, and cultures to make Desertec a reality, then it will remain a dream. And even if the system were built before mid-century, how long could it withstand terrorism or wars in that part of the world? Not long, I fear.
Rather than massive CSP facilities, it might make more sense to spend money on equipping each home or apartment building with enough photovoltaic collectors and batteries to provide electricity for food refrigeration and other necessary uses.
Hi GIB
Thanks for your reply. To answer a few of your points:
1. We know that very large projects by the standards of their times were constructed in the 1930′s in the depths of the Depression – such as the Hoover Dam, the TVA and so on, plus the mobilisation of WW2 aircraft, tank and armaments production on a MASSIVE scale, so there is precedant for this. I’m also not convinced that all $1.5-2 trln would have to be government-funded. Perhaps 60% private money, 40% government equity with possibly some guarantees on the rest. Some of it could come from overseas. Also, since plants take less than 2 years to build, albeit on a smaller scale, I do not think it unreasonable to finish this in say, 10 years. The key fact here is that it would get us off foreign oil for good, saving, I think, $700m in imports per year. While clearly one does not replace the other, it’s still worth noting that 2~3 years of those savings would pay for the $1.5-2t capital cost, if they could be applied.
3. Also, if it was agreed that muc or all of the loan interest or investment would be financied by the electircity sales – as was exactly doen with the Hoover Dam – you have a very low risk set of stable cash flows with which to back up the investment. the
2. Clearly factories for the equipment, RFP’s and so on do NOT currently exist, but nor were they in place for B52 bombers during WW2 or for the TVA or Hoover Dam, but they obviously happened, so why not for the thermal solar power plants also?
3. The unfortunate thing is that the longer we leave doing this project, the more unaffordable it will become. Since steel, glass, machinery and so on will all go up in price as oil gets more expensive, so the plants’ capital cost will go up, making the plants and their electric power more and more expenisve. If you weant cheap electircity in the future, build the plants now. If you want it to be expensive, wait another few years to ensure that the electiricty is very expensive. The “trick” is to build the plants now, when oil prices are still (kind of) low, so that by the time they come on stream the electricty will not have become unaffordable Waiting is the worst thing that can happen, since right now EVERYTHING we make, do, eat, drive and manufacture is still subsidized by relatively cheap oil.
4. DESERTEC is actually a worldwide phenomenon. The Desertec USA website can be found at:
http://www.desertec-usa.org/
Weblinks to all the other Desertec websites can be found on that one (India, Asia, Australia, etc). The reason I cited the UK/EU Desertec website was because it contained a lot more good webpages. I am actually the moderator of the Desertec USA email group, so it does exist here in the US.
4. Basicaly while I suggested that thermal solar power plants coulld supply all the US’s electricity needs, it would be folly to put “all the eggs in one technology’s basket”. The US alos has VERY large potential for wind power generation, a fair bit for tide and wave and a moderate potential for more geothermal. Clearly having a ‘portfolio’ makes sense for better energy security – as we do today (coal, gas, nuclear).
5. Your suggestion of more PV panels on roofs I think may me without long term merit, unless significant ways can be found to cheapen PV’s manufacturing costs, not just in dollar terms, but in ENERGY inputs. Clearly if energy inputs go up in unit price, PV panels will themselves become uncompetitive unless their structurally-required energy inputs can be permanently reduced.
5. I have seen some new solar thermal technologies which would be good at the individual rooftop, district or community level. I think these options should also be explored in Sunbelt cities as well as putting large scale solar thermal plants in the desert and adopting other renewable technologies.
In conclusion – I would say build all renewable energy plant and equipment starting NOW and as fast as you can, to keep the resultant electricity more affordable – bascially for ever…