WhoIsJohnGalt

All of our energy comes from the stars. The sun just happens to be the star nearest to us. Inside the earth are radioactive metals which we could and should be using as a source of energy, but are not simply because a benighted few hippie types have demonstrated against nuclear power. Those metals were formed in a very old star that fused everything it could to make heavier and heavier elements until it started forming the element iron. Everything the same weight or heavier than iron requires energy instead of producing energy as it fuses. Once the fusion of iron began, the star could no longer support itself against its own gravity and it collapsed rapidly, forging the rest of the heavy elements we find in nature and then exploded in what we now call a supernova.
 
The explosion was vast and it flung all of the elements produce by that now long dead star all over in space. The planet earth and our sun formed out of those elements. If you are religious, just accept this as God's recipe for making a planets and solar systems. I would remind you of what Jesus said about time.

Then, for the next five billion years or so, the sun beat down on the planet Earth, gradually getting brighter and thereby giving life on earth the energy it needed to survive. Over that long period of time, that life blossomed, flourished and died, and was buried in the ground that eventually became the rocks you can see around you today. The energy that that ancient life absorbed and stored as fat and sugars was converted into coal, crude oil and natural gas (methane). It took eons to store all that energy up. No light-to-useful energy process is very efficient. It takes eons for those processes to build up useful amounts of energy. We consume energy faster than the sun can send it to us. This is why all of these elaborate "alternative" or "green" energy schemes will not work.

It is not as though we cannot use them on a small scale because we can. But we cannot use it at a rate sufficient to answer our current needs. Worse, our needs are growing by leaps and bounds. We do not have a choice about whether or not to use the fossilized sources of energy, unless we want to back to living in the stone age. Going back to the horse and buggy days won't make it. We will be obliged to go all the way back to the stone age without f****l f**ls. This is not my ideology at work here, it is natural law. There is no escape from it. Alternative sources of energy are not that useful, so quit making noises about them. We must mine coal. We must drill for oil and gas. We must also start using nuclear power because the longer we wait, the less nuclear power we will have.

woodarch

Eventually, although not in our lifetimes, solar energy will supply the world's energy needs. The sun bombards the earth with enough energy ever hour to supply the entire planet's energy needs for the entire year. The problem is we don't have the technology to harness it and put it to good use.
Nuclear is our best technology and cleanest energy. Especially wafter you consider the mining practices to get the precious metals needed for the "green" energy of solar or wind in the manufacturing of batteries and solar panels needed to make it viable. Not exactly "green".
Uranium fuel the size of a soda can, can supply all the energy I will use in my lifetime.

WhoIsJohnGalt

Solar will only work if we are prepared to go outside Earth's atmosphere to collect it. It could be beamed back to oceanic sites as microwaves and we would the have the option of t***smitting the power directly or splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen so that the hydrogen could be shipped to a mainland site to be used as fuel. Otherwise, solar is only useful for small applications where its intermittent generation can be coped with.