The following global warming article by Adam Werbach refers for its basic figures to another article written by Steve Kirsch. Both give a clear picture of some of our energy needs for the next quarter century:

"Recent studies and calculations have figured out that we need to produce about 13,000 Gigawatts of new zero-carbon energy in the next 25 years in order to prevent a climate change catastrophe.

So how do we get there?  We could do it by building a new nuclear power plant every day for the next twenty-five years.  That seems unlikely.  According to Steve Kirsch, we could do it with wind power, by “installing more than 1,500 large (2 MW, with enormous 100m diameter blades) wind turbines every day for 30 years.” And doing it with solar power alone is even more difficult.

The answer will lie in bringing all of these technologies together, along with a host of new technologies and transmission infrastructure to power our lives.  Efficiency is always the first investment.  In the 13 000 GW model, there’s a 50 % energy efficiency calculation built in.  We’re also going to have to find ways to increase our quality of life while using less electricity."

Personally, I like to think of all of this linking up and intelligent planning, increasing quality as we use less electricity as being part of the big picture, the really SMART GRID.

In future, if industry agrees to standardize what they can, if our planners and regulators get their act together, if we as individuals play our part too that smart grid will change the world. We'll make conscious efforts to use energy efficiently. We'll not waste it but have all sorts of ways of storing or feeding back into the grid what we don't need or don't use.

That's a lot of IFs to contend with, but if we don't, we won't have any energy left to waste anyway...