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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Actually I'd expect developing nations to be the first in adopting a clean energy grid. They have massively rising demand, so they're building new power plants all the time and don't have vested interests trying to milk every penny out of old coal plants. They also benefit from technological advances that countries with aging power infrastructure can't take advantage of. It's not like they're forced to re-live the industrial revolution like it happened in Europe. It's perfectly possible to leapfrog to carbon neutral solutions.

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Developing nations are generally poor compared to developed countries (duh). So they might not be able to afford energy sources with high upfront costs like nuclear, solar, or wind.

If you ignore externalities, coal is likely the cheapest, unfortunately.

This is exactly what DIDN'T happen with, say, telecom networks. Developing countries skipped directly to mobile telecom, allowing them to save a lot of money by avoiding the upfront cost of building a wired telecom infrastructure.

I agree with you that poorer developing nations will want to generally avoid high upfront costs to new energy (if they can). Doesn't building new coal plants present high upfront cost just the same?

Yes. A modern, efficient coal power plant has to be large and takes a while to build. Solar and wind can be built incrementally.

The upfront costs of wind or solar are about the same as building a coal or gas turbine power plant and have far less ongoing costs.

Really not sure why people parrot these falsehoods that are easily proven wrong.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/#total1

That's an interesting point. It's rather like the leapfrog to cellphones without intermediate steps.

No matter what tech is used, it'll be obsolete at some point.

This could be kind of like how a lot of developing countries have excellent cellular phone networks, having mostly skipped the expensive commitment to wire.

You're absolutely correct, I didn't really think about that.

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