45 ms·

I'm not so sure that solar is cheaper in the developing world. As these Indian villagers said protesting solar, "we want real electricity, not fake electricity.

• nimish 10y ago
  Solar micro production is insanely expensive. Nobody thinks it will scale even in places like Germany where it's merely expensive. Grid scale solar is dirt cheap, to the point of being cheaper than coal, but it requires a grid. Not really sure what the point of them highlighting this was. If the villagers had a reliable grid connection, they wouldn't care if it was fed via solar
• michaelmrose 10y ago
  Solar is not a magic wand. People who couldn't afford to get hooked up to the grid for the last 36 YEARS were gifted a limited solution that cost far more than their little village could afford. The wealthy celebrated by hooking up more appliances than the system could handle and then all the recipients of all this free stuff complain that johnny can't study by the light of the silvery cfl. When some are just plugging in a lightbulb and a phone and others are plugging in "energy-inefficient televisions and refrigerators" perhaps either the wealthier should abstain from doing so or should instead invest in more capacity. On a larger scale this would be accomplished with meters and prices that would make using 100x more juice than your neighbor either uneconomical or at least costly enough to build infrastructure but on this scale it would have to have been solved by common sense which like electricity appears to have been scarce.