[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.