Nobody is talking about electric cars except you. We're talking about electricity use in the home: for lighting, small electronics, small appliances like a ric

Nobody is talking about electric cars except you. We're talking about electricity use in the home: for lighting, small electronics, small appliances like a rice cooker or kettle (displacing wood), etc. These are real quality of life improvements: reducing time spent gathering wood, reducing smoke inhalation, reducing cooking time. There is no "infrastructure" of these things, it's a completely stand alone system that requires little maintenance unlike a rotating machine. I have been in the Himalaya where solar panels from China are transported on yaks over the border to Nepal where people buy them on put them on their homes for 50 or 100W of electricity, the first they've ever had. How would you propose these people to use oil? They are hundreds of km from a road driveable with a heavy truck, thousands of km from a pipeline. Off-grid solar power is the MOST reliable form of power generation that exists. It requires no fuel, the amount of resource availability can be predicted with near-certainty without any technology, it has no moving parts, it doesn't require high-voltage equipment or transformers, and it can easily be broken into small pieces for transport on foot or pack animal. That's why I brought up my profession, because you seem to misunderstand what is actually entailed in providing electricity. I've designed, built and run power plants of all types and I would never say that thermal is more reliable for developing countries than renewables.