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Solar isn’t expensive any more. Prices have fallen so much it’s now one of the cheapest forms of electricity — the kind of thing someone living in a shanty town might want to install to replace a sooty diesel generator or an easily broken kerosene lamp.

And if nobody does anything, in a generation the main export will be refugees.




The devil here is in the details.

Solar energy (and you left out, crucially, storage) still isn't feasible for the worlds poor yet, though it is the obvious solution to the problem.

My biggest issue with advancements in solar power + storage is that because so much R&D is happening out West, everyone builds for grid tie use cases.

Can't help but think we'd be much further along if we assumed the current grid didn't exist at all (which might as well be true for the worlds poor)


Batteries are also cheap now. Heck, if you’re talking about literal shanty towns, a bag of rocks on a chain attached to a dynamo bolted to the ceiling can store enough energy to be useful.




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