[demallien]

I agree, but the article was specifically talking about oil, not fossil fuels. But I don't think we're dead in the water on the electrical utility front - fusion research is finally starting to enter the final stretch before commercialisation - ITER is expected to get us to the point where we can construct the first commercial-break-even reactor: http://www.iter.org/proj/iterandbeyond

Actually, I find ITER as a pretty good indicator that governments around the world don't feel like they won't be hurting too much on the energy front for quite some time. If they wanted to, they could up the (in context) risible investment in fusion to get a working reactor up and running by the mid-2020s. I mean they're talking about investing about $1billion per year for the next 30 years, from the entire planet. Up that to $5billion, and you can halve the development time. They really aren't terribly concerned at the moment.

On other fronts, Laurence Livermore is starting to get interesting with their inertial fusion designs: https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/ife/how_ife_works.php

And of course nanotech may yet allow us to produce the cheap, efficient solar panels that would be needed to use solar as a baseline energy source. So no, I don't think it as being much of a risk to move car energy over to electricity, starting today.

[ck2]

NIF is a well designed/funded scam to do weapon research, it will never have a consumer benefit.

[mchouza]

I would not say that NIF is a scam, as they are quite open about their priorities: https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/missions/