I like your ideas, but I think they are not as scalable as your arguments seem to imply. Distributed power generation only works when you have a distributed population. I.e., you might be able to coat every roof of every house in the burbs with solar cells, and fill the country-sides with wind turbines, but this still won't provide enough power for the CITIES. Especially when you are talking about cities in northern latitudes or countryside in gentle climes. For that you need concentrated energy generation capacity (ideally nuclear for base load with gas for peak capacity).
This type of concentrated capacity necessitates high capital investments, either private or government. So while I very much like the idea of the Utopian aggrarian/distributed model, it is simply not realistic. At least not for our current society. Maybe in a couple hundred years as the draw of cities slowly wains and technology allows us to experiment with different social models. But not in the short term. Not even in the medium term. We have too many other things to spend our funds on.
(BTW, I think that we should absolutely switch as much of our power generation to solar and wind as possible. Once the nanotube / multicolor absobtion based solar cells hits the market at reasonable buy-back costs it will make a lot more sense and the
Pickens Plan is a great if expensive idea for reducing the importation of oil and reduction in pollution)
