Can renewable energy sources, like solar and wind, replace coal and oil?
Google ran some practical experiments to see if they can run some of their data centers on renewable energy, and found it was too expensive. Economically, coal won.
Read all about it at Spectrum, an extremely reputable source.
We're going to need something more than we've got now. And both wind and solar are intermittent, and both require large amounts of land and equipment. Some sort of fission or fusion will have to be developed to take up the base load.
Fission has turned out to be disappointing, and fusion is taking forever to get working. Oddly, aircraft manufacturer Lockheed is very optimistic about their Compact Fusion™ system. My own suspicion is that they plan on announcing it a failure, because they're really working on something else, some super-secret black project for the Pentagon. Maybe a stealth ICBM, or a supersonic tunnel boring machine to undermine our enemies. But since they've got to be hiring fusion physicists to at least provide a cover story, it might be some new kind of thermonuclear weapon that's smaller than any H-bomb currently extant. We don't need a bigger bomb, they're already too big for most targets.
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