I’ve been tracking solar too, and there has been a considerable upswing in wide scale consumer applications (as opposed to industrial or high-end). I can’t go an hour listening to the radio without hearing five ads on putting solar on my house.

But solar is only a small part of the solution. It excels in warm climates where there’s a lot of sun. Places like Arizona, where maximum solar flux coincides with maximum AC energy needs.

But for our planet to raise its living standards across the board, we’ll need bigger solutions. Cheap, abundant energy is a big part of making wealthy nations out of poor ones.

Nuclear could get a lot of the job done, and I’m keeping an eye on non-conventional concepts involving smaller, safer, decentralized systems. I’d love to see fusion come into play, but I’m not holding my breath.

Every form of energy generation can play a part. If you live where tidal generators work, use them. Every watt generated by alternatives is a watt we don’t need to burn hydrocarbons for, and even if there were no such thing as AGW, too much of our industrial base uses hydrocarbons as its prime material to waste it by simply burning it.

Maybe there’s a role for space solar power, but launch costs have to go down more than they have.

Sure, it might work. But we have no guarantees.
And there is a natural constraint, regardless of how good the technology is. Solar energy at the top of the atmosphere at the Equator is 1.37kW/m**2. Even at perfect efficiency, in space, it takes a square kilometer of solar collector to replace one big steam generating electrical plant.

I don’t think solar is a solution, if it even gets to 10% of our energy needs I will be really surprised. The same goes for all the other “Green” and renewable sources. They won’t hurt, and they should certainly be encouraged and developed as much as possible, but they won’t solve the problem.

They only things that will really solve the problem are

1) Massive conservation, particularly in our transportation and building . We need to design our cities for the convenience of people, not automobiles, and exploit “green” architecture to minimize our need for electrical cooling. Hell, the Romans designed buildings that worked in Italy’s climate, there’s no reason we can’t.

2)Massive re-introduction of nuclear power, but do it right this time; not as pork barrel for the electrical industry.

3) We’re going to have to learn to get along with less. Instead of a house in the suburbs with two cars, an apartment in the city with good public transport. We don’t have to go back to 18th century pastoral society, we can live like they do in Manhattan. If you want to live in the country and own a horse, great, but you should be willing to pay for it. All of it.

4) Massive investment in new technology. Even if it doesn’t succeed, you always turn up something useful, and who knows? Maybe we can get lucky and come up with fusion power or microwave solar satellites in orbit.

This is all technically, and financially within our reach. We can have our cake and eat it too if we’re willing to eat less and share more. Whether this is politically possible is something else.

Of course. We could just do nothing and hope we get lucky with #4.