[simonh]

> I think the fact that it isn't cheap shouldn't be that much of an issue...

EDIT: Apologies for the combative tone below, what I'm trying to say is, it's not as simple as monetary cost.

I'm afraid that's looks like first world thinking. For countries still developing lives are literally at stake right now. Rolling back environmental impact means lower economic growth, poorer infrastructure and therefore people dying in poverty.

It's not all bad news on this front. Modi committed India to opening a swath of new coal power stations before coming into office, but has since changed tack with the collapse in the cost of solar energy[1]. Still, this will be new solar capacity and while it's better than more coal it's still environmentally worse than no new energy generation at all.

[1]https://www.ft.com/content/b8d24c94-fde7-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e...

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> this will be new solar capacity and while it's better than more coal it's still environmentally worse than no new energy generation at all.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.

Can you elaborate more on this last point?

Do you mean to imply that one approach to the problem is to build no new electricity capacity?

How will we displaced fossil fuel use for transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mineral processing if not with new electricity generation?

Or did you mean to imply the world would be better off if India’s poorest continued to suffer in the dark and cold?

[simonh]

All I'm saying is that new capacity to meet an increased demand has an environmental impact even if it is solar.

More broadly my point is we cannot expect developing countries to simply stop developing. That's not an acceptable short term cost, as I pointed out when I said lives are at stake. I'm pointing out some complexities in the issue. How you can get from that to me saying poor people should suffer in the cold confuses me.

[tremon]

Rolling back environmental impact means lower economic growth, poorer infrastructure

This isn't true. It just requires a different development path than Europe and Asia have followed. For example, local power generation can bootstrap a small, isolated economy without requiring massive investments in a nation-wide energy grid. And renewable power (solar or wind) lends itself much better to small-scale deployments than fossil fuel generators.

[simonh]

All of those increase environmental impact, they just do it less than historical approaches. Actually rolling back environmental impact is another thing altogether.

[bluquark]

The last ten years' experience with renewables has shown that local-scale generation is underwhelming and large-scale deployments are the way to go.

With the exponential recent declines in production cost, most of the cost of solar is now in deployment, not manufacturing the cells. This has made huge desert installations much cheaper per watt than rooftop -- as a result, large-scale installations is where almost all the growth is coming from.

As for wind power, efficiency increases superlinearly with blade length. As a result of this, and improving material science and production/deployment tech, turbines have been getting enormous (Eiffel-tower-sized or more) and no longer fit outside of dedicated wind farms.

As for nation-wide grids, they're are a central part of the solution to solar/wind intermittency (because weather patterns average out over long distances).

[zip1234]

Yes, this. Cell phones in Africa are a great example. They skipped right over having land lines and went straight to cell phones.