Alternative energy when demanded by people who have no technical knowledge regarding the subject often turns into a giant crapshoot.

For example, most of us think that installing power saving bulbs will save energy and thus help mother earth, but the reality is that due to the harmonics and switching load, you have to derate transformers as they start heating up and wasting energy, you get voltage fluctuations that have a detrimental effect on stability, you have circulating neutral currents and unbalanced loads further wasting power, not to mention, all of this has to be corrected by capacitor banks that require more resources to deploy.

Saving the earth? Best way is to turn the power off.

I'm in the power field and i realize after doing the math that nearly all alternative energy sources are pipe dreams at best. For example to reach 30 percent efficiency from Solar panels, you have to apply GAAS semiconductors, which comprise of Gallium and Arsenic, the latter being a poisonous compound. Not to mention the fact that silicon wafers are extremely expensive to produce at best, GAAS nonewithstanding.

Secondly with wave and wind power, you have the issue of transporting all that power from point A to B, add cable loss, conversion loss, coupling loss and other forms of loss, you have yourself a big problem. It's pretty obvious that a power generator of 1mW that's 1km away is going to deliver more power than the same generator 100km away.

Essentially there's no point dreaming until the dollars and cents parts add up. Our current industrial base is unsuited to such alternative power, and until we adapt it to be able to mass manufacture the supporting technologies, it's gonna be hard and expensive.

Dedicated research is easily talked about, hard to do, trust me on that one. There are limits to how far you can push a particular technology.

Most people believe that alternative energy is in finding new source. Didja know that most diesel plants are only 18 percent efficient?

It's not as exciting as fusion or GaAs solar panels, but i believe that transmission line matching, superconductors, proper application of insulation, proper spacing and use of dielectric, the minimization of corona effect, proper grid routing, efficient start-stop cycles, power factor corrected houses and so on have a lot more potential than most of these ideas.