I think steam is a better source of power than water because you didn’t need to be next to a stream, river, rapid, etc to harness its power. As long as you have access to water you can create power just about anywhere.
The best source of power we have today is solar energy due to its renewable qualities. It does have some cons it’s biggest is that it needs large amounts of space to catch the suns rays and if you wanted to store this energy you would need many batteries which makes solar power very expensive to get/ maintain. I think the closest runner up would be nuclear and or fossil fuels because they can produce a lot of energy for a very small price in comparison to solar energy. It’s biggest cons are it’s negative environmental effects.