Avi Lewis, Stephen Lewis, Michele Landsberg & Naomi Klein at the *This Changes Everything* premiere at the Ryerson Theatre / Toronto International Film Festival (Ryerson, the university where I decided to not graduate from the film studies program)
I wonder if, in some way, the economy ‘knows’ that renewables can’t work out as well as techo-wishers hope. This despite the falling prices for the actual equipment, which make the conversion proposition look better and better, the actual reality of total installed cost and opportunity lost cost and sunk cost in other technology is holding back the broad adoption and conversion.
“Money is but a proxy for energy”, as you say, So banks are, if not exactly batteries, at least capacitors, and they are therefore, currently, bleeding capacitors. Building an economy that doesn’t cater to customers, but to consumers, means that the entire bond/derivative/credit machinery is dependent on continually increased consumption, so that so-called “economists” like NYT’s Paula Krugman can chastise people for cutting down on consumption with trite, misleading paradigms like “The Paradox of Thrift”, a catchy phrase that suggests private citizens’ austerity is bad for the overall economy. However, the amassing of enormous fortunes is nothing more than a very few individuals doing the same thing to the money supply that his “Paradox of Thrift” does, creating instability in the underlying economy by storing vast quantities of energy/money, the storage of which, likes all energy storage, itself takes energy, and the more of it that is stored, the larger and larger percentage of the energy/money produced is siphoned off for it maintinance. Because pursuant to the second law of Thermodynamics, it would tend to caos, ie disbursement, if resources weren’t marshaled to ensure otherwise. Thus, altho Ms.Klein may be right in her wish to establish a minimum income, it would be far more energy efficient to smash the monopolies of production and the computerization of, well, everything, that enables such massive cancerous concentrations of energy into one glowing radioactive unstable atomic pile.
And on top of that we keep hearing how the price of photovoltaic- and wind-derived electricity is dropping so much that it’s becoming competitive, if not cheaper, than coal- and natural gas-derived electricity. But what’s the fine print there? I’d like to find that out.
Although those “capacitors” are hooked up to free energy devices (read: fractional-reserve banking). 
And yeah, concentration/centralization of power is one mother of a problem, isn’t it?. And how are we supposed to “smash” that? That being said, I did literally smash my camera (see the top right of this page if you’re not accessing FF2F on a mobile), so I suppose that’s a start.