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The intermittent

ronmentally conscious world because

of siting constraints.

characteristic of

The Petroleum Economist's headline for

wind and solar

1998 projects, "Ever Greater Use of New

energy could

Technology,"2 5 0 will also characterize future

years, decades, centuries, and millennia

make those ener-

under market conditions. If the "ultimate

gies bridges to

resource" of human ingenuity is allowed free

rein, energy in its many and changing forms

conventional

will be more plentiful and affordable for

energy.

future generations than it is now, although

never "too cheap to meter" as was once fore-

cast for nuclear power. For the nearer and

more foreseeable term, all signs point toward

conventional energies' continuing to ride the

technological wave, increasing the prospects

that when energy substitutions occur, the

winning technologies will be different from

what is imagined (and subsidized by govern-

ment) today. Such discontinuities will occur

not because conventional energies failed but

because their substitutes blossomed.

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