The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [37]
Wind and solar, in contrast, are the fastest-growing energy sectors today. Although wind power provides barely 1% of the world’s electricity, that number hides enormous differences around the globe. Nearly 4% of electricity in the European Union, and nearly 20% in Denmark and the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, comes from wind.152 This has partly to do with geography—the mid to high latitudes are windier than the tropics, for example—but much of it is driven by investment.
The wind power trend kicked off in the 1980s in California and in the 1990s in Denmark. Today, Germany, the United States, and Spain are aggressive wind developers and presently lead the world in total installed power capacity, each with fifteen thousand megawatts or more (a typical coal-fired power plant is five hundred to a thousand megawatts; a thousand megawatts might power one million homes). India and China are close behind with six to eight thousand megawatts. Canada, Denmark, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom all have installed capacities of one thousand megawatts or more. Altogether, at least forty countries worldwide are now developing wind farms,153 and all of these numbers are growing quickly.
The reasons for this rapid growth are many. To start, wind is free. Wind turbines are relatively cheap, consume no fuel or water, emit no greenhouse gases, and, aside from the permitting process, can be installed quickly. Because wind farms are comprised of many turbines, it is possible to start small, then grow capacity over time. At present, wind power is one of the cheapest renewable energies, averaging around $0.05 per kilowatt-hour,154 putting it closest to conventional fossil-fuel electricity prices ($0.02-$0.03/ kWh). The main concerns with wind power are bird and bat deaths, conflicts over land use, and aesthetics. Most wind farms today are on land, but offshore installations are also gathering investors’ interest. While it’s harder to install turbines and grid connections in the ocean, offshore winds are stronger, so they produce more electricity, and there is less competition for the space. In 2010 the Obama administration approved the United States’ first offshore wind farm near Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
The wind power industry has a thirty-year legacy and is now reaping double-digit growth. Depending on the choices we make,155 our global wind power capacity is expected to grow anywhere from tenfold to over fiftyfold by the year 2050, cornering 2%-17% of the world’s electricity market.
That leaves solar energy. The Sun, in principle, offers us more inexhaustible clean power than we could ever possibly use. One hour of sunlight striking our planet contains more energy than all of humanity uses in a year. It absolutely dwarfs all other possible energy sources, even if we add up all of the world’s coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, hydropower, wind, and photosynthesis combined. It is nonpolluting, carbonless, and free. Panels of solar photovoltaic cells have been powering satellites for over half a century, and we see their familiar shape all around us—encrusted on streetlights, garden lamps, and pocket calculators. Why, then, is our total world production of solar photovoltaic electricity equivalent to that of just one very large coal-fired power plant?
For all its largesse, sunlight has a fundamental problem. Although vast in total, its