Granted , for now they are only used for charging cellphones and only some lighting , but it ' s a promising startThat ' s pretty much what a fully renewable lifestyle looks like . The notion that we can have a fully developed economy run on purely renewable energy is a fantasy . People in the first world are particularly deluded because they have outsourced a lot of their production to other countries . I think renewable can get an economy to about 25 % of the lifestyle that the 1 st world is accustomed to . And , frankly , that ' s not too bad . But if they ' re being sold on the idea that they can have McMansions , a throwaway consumer life , giant SUVs , paved roads everywhere , jumbo jets to fly around the world , giant shipping containers arriving in ports daily etc , that ' s incorrect . That particular kind of life is based entirely on extremely energy dense fuels like oil , coal and natural gas . As an aside , no one really knows exactly what a renewable future looks like . Those solar panels in Mozambique were almost certainly made in China by a plant that used a whole lot of fossil fuels in its supply chain mining , transport , production , transport . The all in fossil fuel cost of solar panels isn ' t a known thing .