I recall that adviser of the Mongolian President Tsagaan called
for Mongolia to become “the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy” a couple
of years ago. I also expected at the time that Saudi Arabia might be
interested in getting there first. Now there is a headline
about the Saudi oil minister wanting to talk about solar energy at the
OPEC meeting in Vienna. The minister thinks that in the future Saudi
Arabia will export lots of electricity instead of oil.
If so, Mongolia still is in a favorable position when delivering to
the massive Chinese market. That’s because the distance is much shorter.
That matters much more for electricity than for oil. But anyway, the point I would like to make: A country can’t choose how much fossil fuel reserves it has. That is a
lottery where Saudi Arabia just happened to draw one of the winning
tickets.
But a country can choose if they want to end up importing or rather
exporting energy fifty years from now. That question is decided by a
race on renewable deployment. If the Japanese stick to their glorious goal of covering a whopping 1.7 percent of electricity
(not energy) demand from wind in 2030, they will need to import more
energy than if they had a goal of 20 or 30 percent wind energy.
If the present German government sticks to their strategy of slowing
down renewable development because they want to help coal stay longer in
the market, Germany will end up importing more energy fifty years from
now than if a government with the Green party involved had kept up the
aggressive deployment.
This is a race not only about how much CO2 gets into the atmosphere
before the last fossil fuel is burned. It is also a race on how the
renewable resources are distributed. It is a race on which countries get to be the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy fifty years from now. Both Germany and Japan don’t look like potential winners in this race.
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/06/05/saudi-arabia-may-become-the-saudi-arabia-of-solar/