3.7. Living on other countries’ renewables? http://www.ck12.org
3.7 Living on other countries’ renewables?
Whether the Mediterranean becomes an area of cooperation or confrontation in the 21st century will be of strategic
importance to our common security.
Joschka Fischer, German Foreign Minister, February 2004
We’ve found that it’s hard to get off fossil fuels by living on our own renewables. Nuclear has its problems too. So
what else can we do? Well, how about living on someone else’s renewables? (Not that we have any entitlement to
someone else’s renewables, of course, but perhaps they might be interested in selling them to us.)
Most of the resources for living sustainably are related to land area: if you want to use solar panels, you need land
to put them on; if you want to grow crops, you need land again. Jared Diamond, in his bookCollapse, observes that,
while many factors contribute to the collapse of civilizations, a common feature of all collapses is that the human
population density became too great.
TABLE3.6:
Power per unit land or water area
Wind 2 W/m^2
Offshore wind 3 W/m^2
Tidal pools 3 W/m^2
Tidal stream 6 W/m^2
Solar PV panels 5 [U+0080][U+0093] 20 W/m^2
Plants 0. 5 W/m^2
Rain-water (highlands) 0. 24 W/m^2
Hydroelectric facility 11 W/m^2
Solar chimney 0. 1 W/m^2
Concentrating solar power (desert) 15 W/m^2Renewable facilities have to be country-sized because all renewables are so diffuse.
Places like Britain and Europe are in a pickle because they have large population densities, and all the available
renewables are diffuse – they have small power density (table). When looking for help, we should look to countries
that have three things:a) low population density;b) large area; andc) a renewable power supply with high power
density.
TABLE3.7:
Region Population Area(km^2 ) Density (persons
perkm^2 )Area per person
(m^2 )
Libya 5760000 1750000 3 305000
Kazakhstan 15100000 2710000 6 178000
Saudi Arabia 26400000 1960000 13 74200
Algeria 32500000 2380000 14 73200
Sudan 40100000 2500000 16 62300
World 6440000000 148000000 43 23100
Scotland 5050000 78700 64 15500
European Union 496000000 4330000 115 8720
Wales 2910000 20700 140 7110
United Kingdom 59500000 244000 243 4110