There is another extremely important point that I wanted to add.

Something I am telling U.S. Energy Policy makers is one of the most important things for them to do as quickly as possible is to roughly determine how much energy we actually need and how much we will need in the future. That information can then be used to formulate energy generation policies.

If you look at a typical American family and consider the present efficiency of cars and refrigerators etc., how much energy does the average person need during a given day? The calculations would take taking into account the need for food, the construction of a home or apartment, energy to heat or cool the home, transportation for everything including travel back and forth to work, the amount of energy used by a given person in connection with his or her job be that cooking hamburgers or piloting an ocean liner, vacation time energy such as flying to a tropical resort, and on and on.

Once that has been determined, that number needs to be multiplied by a factor of something like 7 billion, the total number of people on the planet. The general rule for energy generation should be,

If there isn’t enough energy for everyone, then there isn’t enough energy for anyone!

Countries will go to war with one another for example to get the energy they need and want. It is a lot cheaper and safer to simply increase our energy generation capabilities than it is to go to war with another country or have them start a war with us.

When those calculations are done I believe that it will become obvious that we need a lot more energy than we think we need. And the only three sources of those amounts of energy that I can think of are the ones described in my Energy Islands report. I expect that fossil fuel combustion and most renewables combined simply won’t provide us with the tremendous amounts of energy that are needed by an energy staved world.

Here are the proposed new U.S. Energy Secretary’s thoughts on a variety of energy related subjects.

http://www.switchenergyproject.com/experts/Ernie-Moniz#/moniz-energy-expert

His opinion appears to me to be that the U.S. new energy research development budget is underfunded by a factor of three. Personally I believe that the underfunding factor could be much, much higher, perhaps between 10 and 1000!

These are personal opinions.