Energy production is a lot like life: People don't care what your disadvantages are, they just care about the bottom line. Will you make their life better if they choose you, and if so, by how much? They do have options after all. You can argue all day about how solar is best for the environment but if you can't provide an 850 MW power plant that produces base load power cost-competitively, then people don't really care. The way of going about this is identifying all of renewable energy's disadvantages.

1. Expensive
2. Poor power production capacity factor
3. Inferior energy/power density 
4. Highly intermittent
5. Takes up impractical amounts of land
6. Geographically limited
7. Requires government subsidies to be remotely cost-competitive

I'm not 100% sure on this, but this is a rough guesstimation of energy densities of renewable energy in order of greatest to smallest.

1. Geothermal
2. Hydroelectric
3. Solar
4. Wind

 Here's an idea that will obviously infuriate environmentalists: If you want to guess which sources of renewable energy are most likely to work, look at which ones oil companies are investing in. Sounds crazy, right? Listen to an oil company? Well, here's the thing. A better way to think of an oil company is really to think of them as an energy company. Oil is just their primary medium by which they produce the energy that moves society, literally. That being said, they have a vested interest in producing lots of it; and let's be perfectly honest: They are infinitely better at producing power than any renewable energy company could ever hope to be. Therefore, if they can produce lots of energy, they can make lots of money, something ever business in the history of mankind has been established for. With that, the sources of energy they're devoting lots of time and money towards will be the ones that produce a lot of power, and renewable power is exactly what people want. For instance, geothermal power is the most energy dense source of renewable electricity, and Chevron happens to be the world's largest owner and operator of geothermal power plants in the world. Here's a quick video for you on that. "Chevron's geothermal operations from the four projects in Indonesia and the Philippines currently have the capacity to produce 1,273 megawatts (1.273 GW) of renewable geothermal energy, enough to meet the needs of millions of people in those countries." Solar can't hold a candle to that. Another renewable source of energy is oil's substitute: algae biofuel. This is the ultimate biofuel and here is a video from Exxon which shows how enthusiastic they are about making it apart of America's energy mix.

Two Birds With One Stone

With renewable energy you do not have to mine a source of energy and then ship it to a power plant and burn it. The source of energy is produced on site and immediately distributed. This tends to create a bit of a disadvantage: Your power plant won't be operating at an optimal capacity factor, and you have to build transmission lines out to the source since it is geographic-dependent. However, that challenge can be overcome. Renewable energy also is not always needed when it is produced and is sometimes wasted. The solution to all of this is to have renewable power companies, the produces of energy, sell their energy to an energy storage company, the distributors. That way, you can have a more predictable and dependable grid which takes in all sources of renewable energy like geothermal, hydroelectric, and solar, and is then able to store and then dependably store it then distribute it when it is actually needed. Collectively, this will make renewable energy make a lot more sense by overcoming its incurable indeterminacy.

Vertical Geothermal

One should never be worried about not being able to use geothermal power for their local heating. Where housing is tight, its really not an issue. Traditionally, geothermal heat pump systems will expand outwards which can create issues for tightly packed housing. Not a problem however, due to the fact that geothermal can be drilled directly vertical. Here is a picture of such a system of the Rehau Helix Probe.