I'm not sure I'd call the tether experiment an example of "abundant clean energy." The energy that was converted to electricity in that experiment came from the shuttle's motion. The shuttle's motion came from chemical propellants. Until there is a clean way to move a big ether through the earth's magnetic field, then systems like this can' t really be considered clean. Nor necessarily abundant.

I also doubt that we need a better design on the tether - it sounded to me as though better fabrication was indicated.

Curious, I hadn't even heard of this before. But however clever an idea it is, this is just for the Space Shuttle or ISS. Unless I'm missing something, it's not like this is somehow scalable to provide mega- or giga-watts, or portable to the surface for that matter. Absolutely clean energy is a piece of the puzzle we need to solve but I still believe the real problem is social. Our decision-making systems (political, economic, business, intelligence) just aren't smart enough and scalable to handle the throughput of information coming at us. We need a fundamentally new order of social system that's distributed, transparent & self-organized in order to meet the needs of the coming century. Look at the math - networks can handle a vastly greater volume of information than any hierarchy ever could.

I couldn't agree more with the basic premise of the post. There are so many evident sources of "free" energy to exploit - tides spring to mind (a friend of mine has a crushingly simple design for a float-and-platform generator that could be implemented pretty easily and would have comparatively very little impact on the environment, for instance).