The latest Stanford Report has an article about a study by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark Delucci which argues that the world's energy supplies can be provided solely through solar, wind, and hydropower. Moreover, they claim that energy from such sources are near price parity with our current energy portfolio, owing to a decrease in deaths and other health consequences of air pollution associated with fossil fuels and to the fact that electrical energy is approximately 30% more efficient than energy from fossil fuels.
Such a plan would require a complete replacement of existing infrastructure though. Cars would need to be replaced by electric cars, airplanes replaced by planes fueled by hydrogen (formed using electricity), power plants shuttered etc. This seems both inefficient and an unlikely scenario to me, which is why I think biofuels are a more realistic solution, at least in the mid-term, provided we can improve on their efficiencies.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting approach, and I especially liked data points like
"...to power100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing)"
and
"The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world's energy is less than the area of Manhattan." If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice."
That wouldn't be a bad investment.
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