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Originally Posted by Ohio
I like solar much more than wind, which has serious impact upon wildlife. I also like ground source heat pumps.
I seriously doubt Nuclear will ever return. With 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and that Japanese Tsunami meltdown, we have a whole generation of Millennials ready to protest. Also, look how NoKo and Iran used their "power" needs to secretly develop nukes.
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Solar is extremely convenient because you can put it at the end user, as a result we don't need to pay for transmission costs. In addition, by putting it on your roof you take energy that would have become heat and thus raised your cooling bill or increased the heat island effect of cities and turn it into electricity. Two very big benefits. Also, because the energy generation is distributed among a multitude of sites you are actually making US energy production more secure in the event of an attack or act of terrorism.
However, unless we make significant breakthroughs in batteries we will only be able to generate 25% of our power from solar, at the absolute best case scenario. If you add wind to that mix you would increase the total % because wind blows at night as well as during the day. The best place for wind is on the ocean about a half mile from the shore. That would be ideal for 70% of the world's population.
That said, the real future of energy is fusion. I base that on the NJ which "has no need of the Sun".
German Nuclear Fusion Experiment Sets Records for Stellarator Reactor
With new materials like graphene and new quantum computers and AI we should have this thing finally running economically.