Renewable Gold
The balcony of a flat in Largs around 2014. Broad views over the Firth of Clyde. Across the water to the west stands Mount Stuart, home of the Marquess of Bute. An earlier marquess, John Patrick Crichton Stuart was one of the richest men in the British empire. Another of his homes was Cardiff Castle. He owned much of South Wales, built Cardiff docks and made much of his fortune from coal.
The balcony rail had a thin coating of black dust from Hunterston Quay, a few mile down the coast, where ships unloaded their cargoes of coal to be taken away by rail. Now the last coal ship has long gone and the cranes have been dismantled. If the port has a future it is as a graveyard for dismantling redundant oil rigs and a site for making undersea power cables and loading them onto cable-laying ships.
Hunterston tells the history of energy. At least one oil rig was built there and now it is to be where they come to die. Experimental wind turbines have since appeared and been dismantled. A little further south are Hunterston A and B nuclear power stations. The older has been decomissioned and the newer one is being retired. The hills behind Largs and Hunterston are home to hundreds of wind turbines. From the death of fossil fuels, via the false hopes of nuclear to the rise of renewables all in a few square miles.
Coal fuelled the industrial revolution. Then came oil, and this was easier to handle: it could be pumped through pipes and transported by tankers. Countries with oil found they had something the world wanted and places that had not previously benefitted from industrialisation - places like the gulf states - became very rich. Natural gas followed oil, but the tide is turning and the world is rapidly turning its back on these polluting, climate-warming fossil fuels. By the middle of the twenty-first century they will be history, after three hundred years of coal and much less for oil and gas - no more than an instant in man's history.
We hear news, now that Scotland produces more wind power than it can use, that solar power is now cheaper than that from fossil fuels, and that there is talk of laying a cable to bring solar electricity from North Africa to the UK. Very quickly, clean, renewable energy has moved from expensive and experimental pilot projects to becoming the world's promary energy source.
Both coal and oil have been called 'black gold'. Like gold they come from the ground and create great wealth. In the new world we are entering, some countires have new potential sources of wealth - sunshine or wind. There are vast areas blessed with year-round sunshine but with little else in the way of natural resources and with limited potential for agriculture. Other areas are similarly sparsely populated and underdeveloped but are constantly swept by winds. As renewables technology progresses, coastal regions may have similar potential wealth from wave and tidal power. These energy sources are the new wealth potential - not black but renewable gold. Excess power could be exported directly via cables, or used to manufacture green hydrogen - clean energy able to be stored or shipped out.
Countries with gold or diamond mines or with coal or oil or gas usually became very rich but could also be exploited. The age of empires and colonisation saw gold and diamond mines in Africa bringing riches to Europe, while Nigeria has perhaps benefitted less than other countries with rich oil reserves and the Democratic Republic of Congo is having its cobalt plundered to build batteries. Renewable energy has the potential to bring wealth to many underprivileged parts of the world, alleviating poverty and reversing economic migration. There is a risk, though, that the rich developed world, hungry for energy, will exploit the rich renewables potential of third-world countries while leaving them poor. This would be disastrous. Instead, rich countries must help poorer ones grow their renewable energy potential, increasing the sum of global energy wealth and 'raising all boats' while reducing global inequality.
Comments
Post a Comment