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The Do The Math blog has been going through the numbers on various forms of alternative energy, mostly with an eye to how abundant they are, e.g. solar is abundant, wind is useful, tides are niche (locally useful, globally irrelevant.) I'd been planning on summarizing and linking at some point -- but he went and did it himself, with table and links:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/
His whole schtick, by the way, is back of the envelope calculations on growth, energy, and sustainability issues, fed by and sometimes checked against looked up facts. It's all pretty near. And depressing/alarming. Posts outside this series have included "if exponential economic growth continued, what would that mean?" and "is there enough lead to power the US for a week from lead-acid batteries"?
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/
His whole schtick, by the way, is back of the envelope calculations on growth, energy, and sustainability issues, fed by and sometimes checked against looked up facts. It's all pretty near. And depressing/alarming. Posts outside this series have included "if exponential economic growth continued, what would that mean?" and "is there enough lead to power the US for a week from lead-acid batteries"?