The study I linked to looks at nothing but the cost of dealing with intermittency and comes to the conclusion that it's barely more expensive than the current s

The study I linked to looks at nothing but the cost of dealing with intermittency and comes to the conclusion that it's barely more expensive than the current system. Also, once you go into the developing world context a lot of things change. What is difficult and expensive in the European context is to guarantee the last few hours of electricity a year. If you can take an area that has a few hours of electricity a week to that point, you have a massive win already. Plus you can build sector coupling in from the beginning. In a green field scenario you _really_ want wind/solar as a decentral bootstrapping technology that scales down, that can get you a really long way. Bangladesh has >5 million solar home systems installed. That's a Norway or a Denmark population running 100% on decentral off-grid solar. Edit: An important point here is to be aware of time horizons. A study looking at a 2025 or a 2030 system looks very different from one that looks at a 2050 system. If the foreseeable future means the next ten years, then sure.