I just felt like ranting,so I have no idea where this will go.
back in the 70's I was still a teenager and I had a lot of ideas of what the future would bring. Cars got 6-30 MPG. Depending on whether you drove a VW, or other "econobox" or a Lamborghini. Gas was cheap(Yes virginia I did actually pay .25C for a gallon of gasoline) Electricity was cheap, and so was natural gas. Even then I saw the benefits of conserving and producing your own energy in some form or another. There were a lot of ideas floating around, some even used, maybe not efficiently, but used.
Methane was a hot idea then,(YES! you too can get away from the pumps, PIG POWER!) Of course, most people didn't realize to go anywhere you've have to haul a container the size of a tanker truck behind you. ELECTRIC CARS! oh yes some were built, using very heavy Lead Acid batteries, and yes they would go 25 miles,, at 25 miles an hour. Solar Power your home! a $1.00 a watt coming to a neighborhood near you soon! Oh yes solar panels were available and well made ones too, but when you could buy electricity dirt cheap and i mean CHEAP! Why would you invest 3 year's salary in something that would take 40 years to pay off? Financially you would've been better off taking 1/4 of that figure investing it, and letting that pay for your electricity for the next 40 years.
Oh yes there was D.I.Y. back then too, build a savonus rotor out of a 55 gallon drum and a discarded alternator! Of course noone told you that unmodified that alternator had little chance of ever producing anything..and if you did, it still produced little. Build your own windmill! Oh yeah with the magnets available then? laughs.. until SmCo became somewhat affordable, the only way to do it was to regulate a field coil to the best of your ability, of course you lost lots of watts.. It was doable though, IF you had a good, steady wind.. Hydropower? ok that was practical. and relatively affordable too.
Fast forward from 1975 to 2009.....ZOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ok so we've had plenty of time to develop test and implement all this RE stuff, the gas embargo DID kick people in the butt to thinking about how to save, and produce your own..
Cars got 30+ mpg with a decent design and the technology used then.. So WHY can't we get 70 now? hmm... We've had decades to test and refine windmills, and blades. The NACA profiles date back to the 60's. Sandia labs has been testing since the early 70's.. Private companies can't build a decent windmill at an affordable cost by now? We haven't figured out that there is a VAST amount of untapped hydro power in this country? We can't generate our own solar on our own roofs that can compete with a decent payback time? We have to rely on T pickin' his boots to provide tons of FREE (wonders why it always says free when it comes to the wind) windpower?
Consider the design, engineering and expertise it took to develop computer HD's yet you can buy one for 60 that has more capacity than the U.S. gov't BIGGEST computer did in 75... (and i ain't gonna tell you how much that setup cost then)..
Makes you go HMMM.. Where are our priorities really?