Solar power is efficient if correctly applied and refined, but the main issue with it is the inconsistency here in the cold north for example. Wind energy on the other hand could be applied better here, but I don't personally like wind energy all that much, seeing how it's more mechanically demanding and hazardous to avians, not to mention noisy.

Not all.

Airborne wind turbine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All my bets are on wind and water, primarily, since they've got the lowest maintenance costs to my knowledge.

Who would have thought that flying a kite could be both fun and useful. Then again I think these are a bit too massive to be handheld.

*sadface*

They are also fairly unreliable and inefficient, power-per-area wise.

Right, but in mass quantities, that's not as much of a problem.

It also drives costs up. Maintenance of thousands of installations is far worse than a single central powerful one, even before you get to the cost of building those thousands, and finding sites to ruin with them.

These wind concepts are interesting. Also because they would not need so much material. But in any case I think what should not be done is to postpone the move away from fossil fuels and nuclear power because some future technology might be even better than what exists now. Change has to happen now (or actually 20 yearas go). To postpone this vital change any longer is not acceptable. If new and better technologies would come up later, one can still change than, but to keep going as usual in the hope of a future solution is the wrong tactics, especially if it is not absolutely certain how and when exactly(!) these new technologies will be viable.

There are also tactics to deal with the intermittency of power by solar and wind. Among them are heat storage in solar thermal plants (to keep turbines running during cloudy times or night), variable power biogas plants (that run on biogas but only when the other plants lack power), the "smart grid" approach, in which some consumer technologies are remote-controlled to use power only when it is available (washing machines, electric water heaters, chargers for batteries, ...). In any case the impact will be noticeable, it will be more expensive and we'll have to change lifestyle and work on reducing demand (also because we do not want to see so many windmills in front of our houses). Really - saving this Earth, the climate, the health of the people and Nature will not be free.

I really do think that solar power is the way forward, if we can harness it a lot more efficiently than we currently do... After all, the sun is going to be around for as long as Earth is, if not longer... and do you know how much pure energy from the sun actually hits the Earth? Hint; It's a hell of a lot.

Approximately 1000W/m^2, so 500W/m^2 when you take night into account. This is the absolutely maximum, and only goes down when you think about clouds, electrical inefficiencies, etc. It's also, AFAIK, not a lot compared to nuclear or even coal.

(If you want to think into the implausibly far future, then solar is actually the most efficient solution, even more so than nuclear fusion... but it'd have to be solar panelling on Mercury. Earth simply isn't sunny enough.)

Solar power just needs to be used in such large proportions to make up for the lack of efficiency, and that's relatively easy, considering there is no need for fuel or too much maintenance.

Earth is plenty sunny, just not everywhere nor consistently. Plants of all kinds make enough energy from sunlight even in dimly lit areas, so a few well placed solar panels should equal that. Unfortunately our energy needs are a tad bigger than that of plants, but we are constantly moving towards better efficiency in areas of technology.

Photosynthesis is more efficient than even the best solar panels, and plants don't make that much more than they need to sustain themselves. Also, the losses to electrical resistance are proportional to how far you have to transport power, so, i.e. covering the Saraha with solar panels won't power America.

It's perfectly possible if we can build a Dyson shell (a series of satellites to pick it up directly from the sun (either in orbit arond the sun or in High Earth orbit) and beam it to Earth), but trying to use it from the Earth's surface is completely nonviable and is THE most expensive form of energy available, as well as creating complete environmental destruction in areas where resources are processed for it (although many pro-solar people's reaction there is essentially "but that's a poor country, so we don't care").

That is like the most annoying thing with electricity ever. I can haz room temperature superconductor plz?

You're aware that a full-size Dyson swarm takes a couple of thousand years to build, right? :P

Sure, but it's gonna cost you $20m/kg... :awesome:

Well, not really, (yay! :D) since it'll be mass-produced by the kiloton. Unfortunately, we don't know how you'd make one, and also don't have any sort of physical theories about how high-temperature superconductivity works, so we can't even use educated guesses.