I only adress the industrial production of electricity for now:
Fact 1.: Currently manufacturing a turbine for a wind generator eats more energy than it will ever produce in its lifetime.
Fact 2.: Ground erosion and sound pollution are serious issues with wind generators.
Fact 3.: Solar cells don't have a very long life expectancy. (~15-20 years max, then their output dramatically drops) They can't produce any power most of the time.
Fact 4.: Solar cells take highly toxic (Germanium, Arsenic) materials to produce. The fact you need a big reserve in energy production to balance its short powerproduction capacity coupled with its low liftime compared to a conventional power station renders it a highly toxic source of power.
Fact 5.: In the energy industry you can't store what you produce - it should be immediately used. Therefore when their is little use you have to immediately shut down a couple of power stations, and when the need arises immediatelly bring them online.
(The reason for the shutdown is that the use of power generates the magnetic counter force in generators - when its gone the generator can suddenly overspin and damage/destroy itself.)
Both solar and wind power and incapable of this instantenous service, moreover what should we do with the power they make when no one uses it?
(Please, don't talk of batteris - no battery can handle the power levels we speak of, and simply the chemical reactions don't happen fast enough - not to mention you can only reagain about 40% of the input later on).
Addendum: I don't pull this stuff out of my....(whatever you like). I've heard them on a conference of our countries energy experts, read about it elsewhere in the literature of the issue ect.
So far the following options exist that won't be worse environmetally than the ones we use are and are already viable:
oil, gas, coil - duh the stuff we use.
THE Great problem: oil is the base for a myriad of chemical processes. Burning them is the worst thing we could do with it - it's the source of all the plastic you see.
Gas is still availible for a couple of hundred years at least.
Coil is the most polluting, though the new powerstations with sulfur filters greatly reduce the earlier environmental effects. (No more acid rain).
The main problem with the fossil fuels is the CO2 emmissions.
There is an alternative though that is highly overlooked IMHO:
Bio-fuel: Grow stuff, and later on burn it. Wood, alcohol ect.
Pros - whatever carbon you're gonne burn was already reagined from the air by the plants you've grown.
Cons - this won't lower the CO2 level, wood doesn't yield as much energy as any other fossil fuel.
Another renewable powersource: geo-thermal energy.
Its problems: it can't be transferred. It's not really suited to generate electricity, heating a city is more likely. The great problem is what to do with the water we gained from the earth - it's very salty most of the time. It can't be released into the sweet water, and we usually can't pump it back underground since the water resvior rock crumble and clog when the water is removed.
The "NUCLUAR" way:
Pros:
No pollution.
Their is plenty of fuel (especially if you include the uranium in the seawater or more than what we can do with in the next couple of thousand years if you include the Thorium we have).
Cons
It requires a constant and vigilant control and monitoring.
Proliferation danger - It also enables the owner to start an atom program and produce nuclear weapons - terrorists present a problem that the current regulations don't yet know how to handle.
Great con: nuclear power stations can't really be brought offline in a hinch - they can't compansate for the changing need of the network. A shutdown is problematic and a restart takes several days.
Possible solutions to nuclear waste:
Low and Medium activity waste disposal is already solved, it is only the high activity waste that's problematic since it has to be processed for decades before it can be permanently dumped in the apropiate facitlity.
All around the globe deep depositories are under construction. If built, they will allow for a permanent disposal of used fuel for the next 1000 years.
Waste processing combined with transmutation (changing long half life isotopes into short ones) greatly reduces the risk of containment . *
The closed fuel cycle could greatly increase the ammount of power we can gain per kg of fissible fuel and it would also dramatically lower the ammount of waste that has to be dealt with.
*I studied this issue, PM me if you wanna learn more.
