Agnostic, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands have to import their fossil fuels at very high cost so for them to move to renewables makes sense, as it does for isolated mines and towns in Australia and other countries. But fossil fuels remain the cheapest way to produce electricity at present and, for the world's poor, they will remain attractive. India may well be saying that it's moving towards renewables but I won't hold my breath. They have 1.1 billion people to look after and will provide electricity to them in the cheapest and easiest way possible. They are developing their own coal resources much more aggressively than in the past, so on balance I think they will continue to rely more on fossil fuels than on renewables for new electricity generating capacity. Time will prove whether you or I are correct.

Solar & wind combined could not generate enough power to run the 12 volt lights on my yacht, even in the tropics, in the trade wind belt. On ocean passages of more than about 3 days, I would have to run a diesel generator to keep the navigation lights shining. Still 2 or 3 hours of light is better than none for islanders.

Vanuatu and Solomon Islands have the rainfall & the geology to give some clever people small home hydropower, by some very ingenious means, but will not run a village shop if it requires refrigeration.

To run a 20th century home, let alone a 21St century one comfortably requires mains power. Having to catch or kill that which you wish to eat tonight does get bloody tiring. City greenies would be amazed how much one can want a fresh tomato sandwich, a month after the last copra boat called, & a month before the next.

My brother in law, the engineer, just sold his great property, & bought a less great one. Why? To get the hell off a mixture of wind, solar, kerosene, gas & diesel supplying his energy needs. Grid is great is his new religion.

Some day, someone, somewhere will develop a power generation system that actually works as well as the grid does. The only thing we currently know about it is, it will not be any of the Mickey Mouse stuff greens want to jam down our throats today.

The upshot is we have no available system that using solar and wind
plus the magic box that can store electricity efficiently and not
drag the ERoEI of the system down into the useless levels.

It just does not exist yet.
The problem is that solar and wind are so poor to start with any backup
or still night system has to be very very efficient and not have any
effect on the total ERoEI, in other words it needs to be cheap and
have an ERoEI over about 30 to 50.

Until that storage is invented we are up the well known creek in a
wire net canoe.

Bazz, you ignore the power of wishful thinking!

Yes indeed, well there is so much of that about that it is obvious.