Pakistani pre capita GDP - $US 1700.

Yes I'm sure all third world nations aspire to be Pakistan. </sarc>

mhaze,

No one is suggesting Pakistan is an "aspirational end state". It's an existence proof.

A country with per-capita GDP around $1700 seeing rapid, unsubsidised household solar uptake is evidence of how low the entry barrier has become, not where development should stop.

That's precisely why the example matters. It shows electrification pathways don't have to begin with capital-intensive, centrally financed fossil projects to deliver immediate welfare gains.

If your claim is that this model can't generalise beyond Pakistan, then the relevant question is why the price-driven mechanism wouldn't apply elsewhere. GDP alone doesn't answer that.

The Ember group analysis goes further (of course).

"a 420-watt solar panel that sells for around US$60 in Nigeria would produce 550 kilowatt/hours (kWh) in a year at a cost of 14 cents/kWh. Compare that to spending $60 for diesel, at a price of 66 cents per litre (at the time of analysis), an expense that would yield only 275 kWh of electricity, “implying a payback time of just six months” for the solar panel.

Further: The data showed that exports could support record growth rates for 20 countries across the continent from June 2024 to June 2025. The rate for Algeria was stunning, with incoming solar gear increasing 33-fold during that time. Zambia, Botswana, and Sudan rose eightfold, sevenfold, and sixfold, respectively, while Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Benin, Angola, and Ethiopia all more than tripled.

The solar panels imported into Sierra Leone in the last 12 months, if installed, would generate electricity equivalent to 61% of the total reported 2023 electricity generation,

The year’s imports to Chad could similarly generate 49% of that country’s total energy generation in 2023. Solar’s share of energy generation could increase by 10% in Liberia, Somalia, Eritrea, Togo, and Benin, and 5% in 16 other countries.

mhaze, it might be time to hang up your Pith helmet for good.

Oh dear. Let me explain to those who seem to (deliberately? )not get it.

If you want a nation where the people live in something slightly better than abject poverty, then by all means encourage them to rely on home solar panels that allows them to turn on a few lights and maybe run an electric appliance or two.

If you want a functioning economy that allows people to live something approaching a 21st century lifestyle enjoyed in the west, then they need to have massive amounts of reliable power to run cities and particularly factories and manufacturing facilities as well as a functioning service industry. Home solar can't and never will do that.

Its all very well for keyboard warriors to sit in their A/C cooled homes and encourage the 10% of the world's poorest to live the life provided by home solar when they'd prefer the life provided by fossil fuel.

But we have a planet to save from the dreaded CO2 so the abject poor will just have to suck it up, n'est pas?

Oh dear, mhaze.

Do you really believe that starting your posts with "Oh dear" will hide the that you're about to smuggle in a false requirement?

No one is arguing that household solar replaces heavy industry, nor that it delivers a Western lifestyle overnight.

That's a strawman.

The point being made is simpler and harder to dismiss: falling costs are allowing rapid, bottom-up electrification that historically took decades, without waiting for capital-intensive megaprojects.

Lighting, refrigeration, communications, water pumping, clinics, schools, and small enterprise are not "abject poverty". They are the preconditions for growth.

Every industrial economy passed through that stage before factories and steel mills followed. Skipping that step was never how development worked.

What the data shows is not climate paternalism, but revealed preference: people adopting what is cheaper and available now. That doesn't preclude grids, gas, hydro, or future nuclear. It accelerates the path toward them.

If the claim is that this mechanism delays development rather than speeds it up, that needs to be argued, not asserted.

I suppose Woke Marxist's want to choke businesses by denying them electrical power. A similar way that they try to destroy AngloCelts/ Europe by multiculturalism. They must think it's poetic to destroy open society by open society (rhymes with of a people, by a people, for a people... ).