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For those of us of a certain age, it may feel like the world has been here before: sharply rising gasoline prices. Americans concerned about energy security. Governments making frequent announcements of support for renewable energy and efficiency programs.

In 1981, experts were predicting that crude oil prices, then at $35 (U.S.) a barrel, would climb to $80 and the future of what we now call "clean technology" looked bright. Higher energy costs would stimulate investment in alternative sources and in technologies aimed at reducing demand.

But just when it seemed like the alternative energy boom was going mainstream, the law of supply and demand took over. High oil prices encouraged producers to bring new supplies on stream in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, weakening the hand of the OPEC oil cartel. Industrial energy users and motorists responded to high prices by slashing demand, especially in Japan and Europe but even in North America.

By mid-1986, the world oil price crashed below $10 a barrel, and energy remained cheap for the next 15 years. Conservation returned to the fringe of the environmental movement and investment-starved renewable technologies went back on the shelf.

There is a nagging suspicion in the marketplace that history could repeat itself. While 2008 looks a fair bit like 1980, will 2014 offer a replay of 1986? Will the forces driving the current boom in renewable energy and demand-reduction prove as fleeting as they were a generation ago?

Such fears are almost certainly unfounded. The world is undergoing a fundamental shift in energy use: astonishing demand growth from emerging markets is overwhelming the developed world's appetite; crude oil and natural gas reserves are increasingly concentrated in a few states seen as potentially hostile to the West; and — assuming the scientific consensus about climate change is accurate — there will be an expanding global effort to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels.

There are risks to the uninterrupted growth of the clean-tech market, of course. Much depends on government fiat, a notoriously fickle instrument, particularly in difficult economic times.

The "food vs. fuel" debate could sap support for grain-based biofuels in Canada and the United States. A consumer backlash against rising power costs could undermine support for solar, wind and small-scale hydro. And more fundamentally, oil prices may slump dramatically, at least in the short term. Eventually, the U.S. dollar will have to rebound.

High oil prices could provoke enough of a slowdown in demand — and a push for both new crude supplies as well as alternatives such as biofuels — that the market rebalances and prices drop again.

While a boon to the average consumer, low energy prices are the bane of the clean-tech entrepreneur.

But while crude oil markets may well retreat from current record levels, no expert is forecasting a return to cheap oil. Relentless growth from emerging countries such as China, India, Brazil and the oil producers of the Middle East will underpin demand and result, over the longer term, in higher prices, rather than lower ones. Some experts suggest $150 a barrel is not out of reach.

That's the big difference from the oil-price shocks of the 1970s. The early price hikes were supply-driven, as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries used its stranglehold over crude markets for both economic and political advantage.

This time, the fundamental pressures are on the demand side, the result of booming economies in newly industrializing countries.

In China alone, one forecaster recently told a U.S. Department of Energy conference, car sales have risen from 2 million a year in 2000 to nearly 9 million last year. Forecasters expect that by 2020, Chinese demand for crude oil will increase to about 15 million barrels a day, from the current 6.7 million barrels.

The picture is not much better on the electricity side, where governments are fighting to restrain prices even as the future costs of generating power skyrocket. And as prices rise, the incentive for companies and consumers to invest in energy savings will grow.

Even with some modest efficiency gains factored in, most power planners in Canada and the United States forecast a shortage of generating capacity late in the next decade.

But the cost for large power plants is escalating faster than anyone can track. In the United States, major investment banks are unwilling to finance coal plants unless they include untried and enormously expensive technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide.

This isn't because Wall Street has suddenly developed a green conscience, but rather because financiers believe that traditional coal plants — the biggest sources for sending CO2 into the atmosphere — face too much risk as governments move to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Both Canada and the United States are revisiting nuclear power, with utilities planning to build more than 30 new plants in the United States, and several in New Brunswick and Ontario. But even if all the political opposition to nuclear fails to derail those plans, the cost of new reactors remains staggeringly high. And nuclear, with its large upfront construction costs compared with natural-gas or coal-fired power, is particularly vulnerable to the rampant inflation in major project costs that the world is witnessing.

To reduce future power needs from fossil fuels and nuclear, most utilities now have "renewable portfolio standards," to meet a certain percentage of their power requirements with renewable power. Often, the price of that alternative energy well exceeds current average power costs, but can be a bargain compared with building new capacity. That will increasingly be the case as governments impose emission limits on utilities.

All this adds up to a booming business on the demand side of the energy equation. Utilities are paying companies and public institutions to reduce their peak-time power needs to eliminate the need for new generation. As energy costs rise, consumers will find it increasingly cost-effective to invest in efficiency and conservation, which will pay for themselves over shorter and shorter time horizons.

It's now said that the cheapest and most abundant energy source in North America is the opportunity to reduce our demand.

If there is one lesson from 1980, it is that experts' prognostications are often wrong. There is no question that investments in renewables and energy efficiency involve some market risk. But when weighing the options, a business-as-usual energy strategy — whether for a company or a government — would appear to be the riskiest path of all.