Solar

China may have a lot of problems, but at the same time the country is making huge strides in Renewable energy, with Solar prices coming down and mass production going way up in the last year and even more scaled up in the next 2-3. read here.

Solar Energy contains the highest potential of possible energy capture of all Renewable resources, the problem of course is advancing the technology to capture all of the potential energy, they say that "The earth receives more energy from the sun in just one hour than the world uses in a whole year" and with prices expected to come way down, the time it takes to regain your investment will also come way down.

Also don't forget that electricity is not the only energy to be captured from the sun, the heat that can be captured to make hot water is actually a very efficient technology, and can be used to heat the home with, or just for your basic hot water needs, with some units even able to heat the water on semi-cloudy days. In some cases an over sized system could produce so much hot water that the water would boil inside the tubes causing them to explode ( bad setup ).

Combine these technologies with a passive solar home and a large thermal mass (read Earthship), to capture even more of the suns energy, and you've got yourself a pretty decent setup using just the energy from the Sun.

There are limitless ways to use the suns energy, so why haven't we, and why don't we use more of them. the sun gives us free energy every day, and instead we ignore its potential and continue to build structures that actually try to block or avoid the sun.

Sorry, I had to rant today and get it all out.