I'd love (love) to see your charge your electric car from solar where I live. You might be able to make it down the street a few weeks a year. Snow, clouds, rain, and the simple fact that there is only ~8 hours of sunlight during the winter means it is almost impossible to use that here. Wind is never reliable, almost anywhere, even at the best of times. Hydroelectric? There is some, but that takes a massive amount of land, and is rather dangerous, if the dam breaks (in one instance killing 100,000+ people, but that is nearly worst case). Also, expensive. Tidal? The nearest ocean is ~1,000 miles away, good luck with that. Geothermal? Yeah, can't do that either. So unless you expect to pipe the power thousands of miles (expensive, wasteful, and difficult to maintain), none of that is going to work for me, or large sections of the world's population.
Nuclear? Works fantastic! Probably powering this computer as I speak. Other than that, it's pretty much all fossil fuels and a little bit of hydro (which is pretty limited in it's expansion options).
But you know, you don't have to personally have the solar panels. They could be located in a central area and have power sent to your location.
So unless you expect to pipe the power thousands of miles (expensive, wasteful, and difficult to maintain), none of that is going to work for me, or large sections of the world's population.
but but but mommy! It's too HAARD! :(
Man up. What do you think coal, oil, natural gas etc power plants do now? Do you even remember the massive power outage that affected a large portion of the United States a few years ago? Enough solar energy hits the earth in an hour to fill all our electrical requirements for a year. The only problem would be getting that energy to where people need it. Stop your whining about how hard things are. People could setup individual panels at their homes to reduce load on the grid, and plants can be setup in various locations as well. If one location is cloudy, guess what? Another one probably isn't!
Same goes for wind. Plug your car in and when the wind is blowing, your car can soak it up. They don't have to worry about building large plants in order to store the energy for when it is needed. HELL, electric cars are perfect drains for wind energy.. They can soak up the excess energy produced and then it can be used when you want it. Best part is, lots of people would want to plug in their cars at night when there is no solar but there's usually a lot of wind energy! OTOH, you might plug in your car at work to soak up excess solar energy as well.
Hydroelectric? There is some, but that takes a massive amount of land,
so it doesn't count, right?
Other than that, it's pretty much all fossil fuels and a little bit of hydro (which is pretty limited in it's expansion options).
I'm not sure what country you are from. Here in the USA there's more and more solar and wind power.
Frankly, not investing in green energy right now is going to make a lot of countries hurt worse when fossil fuels start to run out and suddenly the price of green energy skyrockets from the increased worldwide demand.
