Flawed renewable energy

Some days ago, the Dutch media reported that small windmills are no solution for the energy demand; today I read these articles on Slashdot and on Low-tech. It came as no surprise to me that the only relevant factor to windmill power yields is the diameter. This I already heard when I was a child as an answer to why some windmills only have two rotors, whereas others have many- more rotors catch more wind, I thought. (I believe my parents took me to a Greenpeace meeting in the mid-eighties, or 'then-about'.)



After a few clicks, I stumbled upon this Low-tech article: The ugly side of solar panels, where you can read that PV solar panels...

"... with an expected lifetime of only 15 years, the worst case scenario [in which they produce] 207 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour – [are] just 2 times better than gas. Agreed, this is the worst case scenario, and even in that case solar panels are still a better choice than fossil fuels. But it becomes quite hard to describe them as a “clean” source of fuel."

There are much cleaner types of solar panels, but we still have the issue of their influence on the albedo factor of their environment.

Apparently, we really need some revolutionary new ideas on energy production.