Today, in the final article of this series, let’s look at resources above ground. Although of course we need air to breathe, it is everywhere – so not a resource requiring specific efforts to access. We focus the discussion instead on energy resources above ground – wind and solar power. Then we will finish by revisiting the big picture on natural resources.

The early days

Before the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of coal, humanity got most of its energy from burning wood. But wind and solar were also in the mix.

Wind powered sailing ships around the globe as explorers sought trade and riches overseas. Early windmills provided mechanical energy, primarily to mill grain, but were adapted to produce electricity in the late 1800s. Solar energy was used more passively, primarily for heat. For example, the ancestral Puebloan people of the southwestern United States built cliff dwellings strategically to capture sunlight for warmth in the winter.

There is a lesson in this. Early wind and solar did not produce enough energy to show up on a plot of energy sources, but they filled critically important niches that were not addressed by harnessing animals or burning wood. People today who insist the world can be powered solely by their favourite energy source – whether it’s oil, nuclear, or renewables – are generally not seeing the bigger picture and the smaller niches. We need different energy sources for different reasons.

And we still enjoy passive solar heating and sailing ships.

Modern wind and solar power

I do not intend to get into the mechanics of how wind and solar are harnessed to produce electricity – we have all seen and read about wind turbines and solar panels, which are engineering marvels continuously improving with research and experience.

But there are three fundamental issues to address.

  1. Wind and solar produce only electricity, and electricity supplies only about one quarter of the energy humanity consumes. While wind and solar generative capacity is growing rapidly, they still produce far less electricity than coal, natural gas, hydropower, and nuclear on a global basis (Figure 1).

 

Figure 1 – Global electricity production by source. From Our World in Data

Growth curves for wind and solar today are actually very similar to the growth curves for coal and natural gas in their early days of electricity generation, so there is no evidence to suggest that they will soon dominate the electricity picture, let alone the overall energy picture.

There are ambitious plans to create fuels, particularly green hydrogen, from wind- and solar-generated electricity, but costs and available technology are holding back large-scale commercialization.

  1. Wind and solar generate electricity intermittently – only when the wind blows and the sun shines. There is some predictability – we know there is no solar power at night, more solar in the summer than in the winter, and that there are seasonal wind patterns. But to satisfy humanity’s need for always-on electrical power, even places with great wind or solar resources need support in the form of backup generation and/or energy storage.Figure 2 shows the top 10 countries for wind and solar generation as a proportion of total electricity generation. Each taps into very rich wind and solar resources, yet only three produce more than 50% of their electricity from wind and solar – and none of those has high-energy industrial economies. The proportions of wind and solar may continue to increase, but nobody can escape the need to backstop intermittency with other energy sources.

Importance of natural resources Part 4 – above the ground

Figure 2 – Top 10 countries for wind and solar as a proportion of total electrical generation. Statistical Review of World Energy 

  1. Wind and solar resources, like hydroelectricity and geothermal energy, are geographically constrained. They can produce electricity only where the resource exists.

Figure 3 – Global horizontal solar irradiance – a measure of solar power resource.

Vaisala Global Solar Map

Figure 3 is a map of global horizontal solar irradiance – basically the intensity of solar resource available at any particular land location. Not surprisingly, there are rich resources near the equator, and poorer resources toward the poles. But there is an overprint of weather patterns as well – the truly intense solar resources are in dry, cloud-free areas such as northern and southern Africa, Australia, Tibet, and the western coasts of South and Central America. There is less sunshine in the tropical rainforests of South America, Africa, and India.

Four of the big eight countries for solar generation (Fig. 2 – Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Mauritania) make use of very high-quality solar resources.

The wind resource map (Figure 4) is more complex, with relatively small areas of high wind resource in the central plains of North America and Eurasia, the southern tip of South America, borderlands of the North Atlantic, the western Sahara, the Horn of Africa and the high Himalayas. Most tropical areas are pretty much becalmed.

Figure 4 – Mean wind speed at 80m – a measure of wind power resource.

Vaisala Global Wind Map

Not surprisingly, all of the top 10 countries for wind generation (Figure 2) have very high-intensity wind resources.

Geographic constraints on wind and solar generation are really important but generally ignored by those who believe humanity can be powered by renewables. We cannot ship sunshine to northern latitudes in the winter, or export wind to the perpetually calm tropics.

We can transmit electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed, but there are engineering and financial limitations. Modern electrical grids transmit electricity from big point sources – hydro dams and gas-, coal-, and nuclear-fired thermal generation stations – to consumers, but it takes a lot more money and material to tie in a variety of wind and solar facilities developed across big areas.

Global-scale projects have been proposed to ship electricity from high-intensity wind and solar generation areas to big consumers – e.g., Morocco to Great Britain (Britain shuns $34 billion Morocco-UK subsea power project) and Australia to Singapore (Singapore gives conditional nod to import solar power from Australia via 4,300km of subsea cables). However, the Morocco-UK project has been cancelled because the British government believes “domestic projects could offer better economic benefits.” The Australia-Singapore project is in early days with conditional approvals and no guarantee for completion.

Summing up the importance of natural resources

Access to natural resources is critically important for everyone’s well-being. They provide us with water to drink, food to eat, and the materials to build a prosperous life.

But natural resources are finite, and they are unevenly distributed across the planet.

What does this mean in a world with more than 8 billion people?

    • We must take really good care of our essential and limited natural resources, including fresh water, soils, and forests. It is difficult and expensive to repair or replace them.
    • Advancing technologies allow us to extract resources more cheaply and efficiently, but there are limits, and we risk disaster by not seeing those limits. It does not matter how good we are at hydraulic fracturing, there is only so much oil and gas on earth – so we cannot burn them forever. There are simply not enough critical minerals to build out the 100%-electrified world that some people envision – so we have to accept alternatives.
    • Uneven distribution of resources means that different resources are available to different people – and so what we use will be different from place to place.An obvious example – the Canadian province of British Columbia runs on hydroelectricity because it has mountainous terrain and a lot of precipitation. Directly across the Continental Divide, Alberta has poor hydro potential because it is drier and because it is flat east of the Rocky Mountain Foothills.

      Canada produces more than 60% of its electricity from hydro – but only where conditions are right. Elsewhere, we look to natural gas, coal, and nuclear because those are what are available. Wind, solar, and geothermal will always be bit players in Canada because the resources are poor, and generally not close to where people live.

      Similarly, just because European nations bordering the windy North Sea can generate a lot of wind power does not mean that wind is a solution for people in tropical, generally calm Indonesia looking for electricity.

We need to be creative, resourceful, and frugal with our natural resources. We have to make do with what we can access, and figure out alternatives to the resources that are not available to us. Most of all, we have to realize that the only solutions that work are those that can be built or created with the natural resources we can access.

 

(Brad Hayes, BIG Media Ltd., 2025)

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