[ndsipa_pomu]

Certainly sounds like a sunk cost dilemma.

Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.

[api]

That political sunk cost is why the innovators dilemma happens. It happens in companies too where managers, executives, and top employees will have their careers built around a certain way of doing things. Change threatens that so they will resist change and double down.

Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.

It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.