to be honest i think a large part of the solution is trying to reduce peoples reliance on piped energy on wholly or partially cutting them off from the grid network
renewables are a much more viable solution in the context of microgeneration
where is the sense in producing electricity from wind power or sunlight or whatever then piping it to someone down a wire (with all the associated transmission losses) and letting them use that same energy to heat water when they could have had a solar thermal hot water system in their roof or just burned wood?
the thing is the vast majority of our energy consumption (i believe its over 60%) is used in heating, either water or the air space in our homes and all that heating could simply be achieved by burning biomass (and the heat actually kept in by decent insulation)
next comes lighting but we should all be using compact flourecent lamps
what is left over, all the electrically powered gadgest of the modern age, tv's computers, dvd players these are actually all fairly low power devices in comparsison to our boilers and heaters, if we just burned wood to keep ourselves warm we could probably generate enough electricity ourselves to keep these low power (and non essential) toys ticking over
people have mentioned solar panels and like i hinted above they really are a bit of a waste of time, much better use the suns energy to directly heat water than as a horrendously inefficient means of generating electricity and then using that electricity to heat water or air.