Alex,
Out of interest, don't natural gas, shale gas and nuclear get factored into the equation?
Wind power simply does not work to provide energy as needed by the population. They require permanent conventional power back up due to their intermittent nature, the environmental cost of them is huge (piling concrete in fields, bird deaths, noise pollution) and they quite simply are a testament to the folly of agenda / policy led decisions.
Tidal power, hydro electric, geo thermal are all far better than wind power but renewables can not replace conventional power, no matter how much the ideology might want them to.
The Spanish obsession with wind power cost money and jobs. We should take heed.
The whole climate change act is one of the biggest disasters in history. Making people pay more taxes for no discernible difference.
I have every faith in human intelligence and development that any changes that happen in the climate - which are beyond our control - we will be able to adapt to and mitigate. That is if we haven't wasted all our money on wind farms before that!
So I try to stay current on these issues, and am currently taking a course regarding this very subject. I'm open and up for debate, but I'm happy to express my views since it's all so fresh on my mind.
Wind and solar are towards the bottom of my personal list of viable alternatives. Nuclear, while not renewable technically, is certainly clean and viable and while the destructive power of the material is already evident, that doesn't mean it's not the way to go. France is an excellent example of what nuclear power can provide. An interesting side to nuclear is the molten salt reactor (there is a new TED talk about it and an even better hour long video on youtube), but I do not have the scientific background to say whether it's viable or not, and it's currently still under debate.
I believe tidal and wave power hold great promise too, and after all hydroelectric is an old power source. While solar is still not cost-effective, there is still opportunity for improvement, but the fact remains that like all of the electric cars on the road, a great deal of energy and resources are put into making solar panels or batteries. So much so that investing in current solar technology does very little to move us forward. Wind, while totally renewable is far less predictable and therefore less affordable. Currents and waves however (we're talking water not electricity) are far easier to predict and because of the density of water compared to air, can generate a lot of power.
Natural gas and shale get factored into the equation of course, but coal is fairly unique because the cost/BTU, aka the cost per amount of power output, is substantially lower than natural gas, wind, solar, et all. The next 10-20 years are the most important (aren't they always
) since the cost-effective clean options, nuclear, tidal, and wave take at least a decade of planning and building while in the meantime the expensive alternatives, wind and solar can be built quickly but for a price. I don't know what the answer is because there are so many forces at play and so many different bets to be placed. Whatever the route, the goal is to bring the cost of clean energy down enough to compete with oil before coal becomes the best option.
Another quick note to consider (and boy I get to use my population demographics and analysis class here now!), is that the global population is beginning to stabilize and should begin to top out in the next 50 years. The International Energy Agency predicts energy consumption will continue to increase by 2% per year. That rate would lead to a doubling of energy consumption in 35 years, but this is a foolish prediction. The rate of population growth in the last 2 centuries will probably never be seen again in human history (who knows though? Bottlenecks, amirite?) but while we are at a global population of 7 billion today, even robust projections do not predict the world population rising above 9 billion mostly thanks to decreasing birth rates and to a very small extent poor diets (my generation is supposed to live shorter than that of most on this board
). Efficiency has been able to curb the rate of growth of energy consumption relative to the rate of growth of the human population. If the human population does not grow at the same rate, we can also hope for some stability, and eventually a decrease of energy consumption in the future (though not for a while, and not a decrease from current consumption). I still think social security will be a bigger problem than affordable energy in 15 years though, if that makes anyone feel any better. (Note: It probably shouldn't)