David Roberts, thankfully back on task after a year away from the environment blog Grist, always provides thoughtful input on energy and climate policy.
He’s tended to write on American policies and politics, but this week has refreshingly focused a two-part post package on developing countries, where energy needs, and growth, are greatest.
In the first post — “How can we get power to the poor without frying the planet?” — he explores the challenges faced in trying to boost energy access without greenhouse-gas overload. He lays out the arguments of a range of analysts including the Breakthrough Institute, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Morgan Bazilian and Dan Kammen and the Sierra Club. He appropriately frames the piece around the mythological challenge of navigating between Scylla and Charybdis — finding ways to boost energy access while limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
I hope you’ll dig in on the varied analyses, but basic trends guarantee a hybrid future — with a lot of potential for advancing off-grid renewable energy menus, but also a lot of need for conventional (including fossil fueled) energy infrastructure.
Like Roberts, I see enormous potential to ramp up innovative electrification approaches that work from the outside in. A case in point is Harish Hande’s renewable energy company, Selco. More approaches were touched on by Tina Rosenberg in this Fixes post last year: “The Next Wireless Revolution, in Electricity.”
Part two of the Grist package — “What will it take to get electricity to the world’s poor” — gets you to Roberts’s conclusion, which is this:
Everyone should support extending the centralized grid. But my prediction is this: When that grid arrives in areas that have lacked it, it will find a cleaner, more resilient, more democratic grid already growing to meet it, farther along than anyone now dares hope.
Please dive into the links above. Here’s a relevant conversation I had with Harish Hande at an energy meeting in Manila in 2012, in which he explains that arguments about decentralized or grid power fade when you focus on the services energy provides instead of the kilowatt-hours:
