Melbourne

I'm in Australia.
I've been here six months and it was only yesterday I bothered to notice a toilet flushing.
It's a beautiful city that must draw comparisons with every city you've ever visited. It's such a hodge-podge of British laws (Oz is still a member of the commonwealth), American movies and music, Asian and Pacific Islander ghettos--there's big communities of Greeks and Italians and Turks and who knows what else. Melbourne is a prism that shows whatever you're looking for. Let's just call it England with good weather.
I'm working on completing my PhD and putting work together to apply to various Sterling Engine companies in the states (see the wiki for more info). The largest solar generator ever constructed is currently underway just outside California, comprised of several hundred Stirling Engines running on heat generated by a 25 meter solar dish.
Stirling Engines operate on the expansion of a heated gas: first, a piston is moved as the air in a chamber beneath it expands through contact with a heat source, in this case the focal point of a large mirror. Air (or generally Helium) is then pushed from the hot volume to the cooling volume through what's called a regenerator, which extracts and retains some of the heat. As the air cools the piston is pushed back down by a spring or flywheel. And then the cycle begins again.
Make the piston a magnet and wind a coil of wire around it and you've got a generator. Stirling engines are cheap, many times more efficient than Photovoltaics, contain no parts in contact, are hermetically sealed and will run basically forever. NASA has been running one off radioisotopes continuously for 4 years.
It is also possible to build a heat 'battery' using activated magnesium. Magnesium, the world's third most common metal, is also one of the lightest. Its melting point is therefore quite low, and thus hydrated magnesium (MgH_2) is both an ideal storage medium for hydrogen (and has been proposed as the basis of a hydrogen economy) and for heat energy. In one chamber you put the MgH_2; as this chamber is heated to Magnesium Hydride's melting point it liberates the hydrogen which then passes thru a gasket and is stored in a metal hydrate container (soaking up the hydrogen). By manipulating the hydrogen pressure you can re-hydrate the Mg causing it to give up the heat required to melt it. You could also run an air conditioner off the cold produced in the hydrogen container. Around 0.8 kWh/kilo of Mg may be stored indefinitely in this manner (i.e. a 2-liter bottle could run your house for several hours, depending on the efficiency of the Stirling engine you run off it).
If (and this remains a big if) you could build a 1 kW Stirling Engine for less than $1000, you would in one step solve the world's energy problem. Make the mirrors from inflatable mylar (see NASA's attempts) and they're basically free and the whole thing (engine, mirrors, and battery) fits in a duffel bag. Sell 'em at Wal-Mart.
OK it's a dream but this at least is a solvable problem. "Build a small engine for $1000" is more reasonable than "replace the entire oil infrastructure". Although this must surely happen in our lifetimes.