Aiming for a future where we use less energy than we do now is backwards. I'm not advocating that making existing systems more efficient is a bad thing at all, but to power things that will progress society will require more energy per person consumed than we do now regardless.
Wireless power requires 60% more base power. The often dismissed as impossible flying cars require at least 1.5MW per person. One day it is not far fetched to think we will replace the microwave with a device that can assemble atoms and completely replace farming, which will take serious power. This is what I think even the solar/wind/geothermal people who don't want to move back into caves intuitively understand is the kind of changes that will occur sometime in the future.
Solar panels belong in space. They are much less efficient than hydro-electric, which is about as efficient as coal, which is 6 million times less energy dense than nuclear fission, which is less energy dense than nuclear fusion, which is only 2 orders of magnitude less efficient than antimatter-matter reactions. Spread out to consumers, solar panels also produces a lot of waste that future generations will have to deal with.