Dan Luke opined

"Dan" wrote:

There are enough coal and oil shale reserves in the US alone to
provide internal demand needs for 150-500 years

But they have serious environmental downsides, both in extraction and
burning.

Solar energy may be harvested in several ways
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower . Wind power harvest is
experiencing rapid growth in the U. S., showing potential to be a serious
contributor to the national grid, increasinig ten-fold in ten years:

=================
In recent years, the United States has added more wind energy to its grid
than any other country; U.S. wind power capacity grew by 45% to 16.8
gigawatts in
2007.[34] Texas has become the largest wind energy producing state,
surpassing California. In 2007, the state expects to add 2 gigawatts to its
existing capacity of approximately 4.5 gigawatts. Iowa and Minnesota are
expected to each produce 1 gigawatt by late-2007.[35] Wind power generation
in the U.S. was up 31.8% in February, 2007 from February, 2006.[36] The
average output of one megawatt of wind power is equivalent to the average
electricity consumption of about 250 American households. According to the
American Wind Energy Association, wind will generate enough electricity in
2008 to power just over 1% (4.5 million households) of total electricity in
U.S., up from less than 0.1% in 1999. U.S. Department of Energy studies have
concluded wind harvested in just three of the fifty U.S. states could
provide enough electricity to power the entire nation, and that offshore
wind farms could do the same job.[37]

-Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power

Texas had a big problem a few weeks ago: the wind stoppped blowing. There was a
hell of a scramble to get the fossil fuel plants online.

The big problem with wind is that it is not constant, and unpredictably so. So
you must have conventional backup ready to go. So all you save is fuel costs at
a huge capital expense. A gigawatt of wind power will not replace a gigawatt of
coal, or nuclear power.

-ash
Cthulhu in 2008!
Vote the greater evil.