I work in Climate. The reality is that energy poverty is more dangerous and harmful than higher co2 emissions. Even though i work in climate, i believe we need to have much more oil for many years, atleast oil is better than coal.
To Vote4worldpeace — would you change your mind about wnating moe oil — if you were made aware that a solid-state elecric powere supply, invented in 1982 / professional laboratory successfully tested in 1984 / US Patented in 1992- “finally” being privately developed for mass production and installation.
This is the case: because some engineeers finally realized tht they had been lied to when they were taught that how the cicuitry works “was impossible” - because the World had been using the same electic power supply circuit: used exactly the same way as the resonating receiver circuit found in the billion of radios manufactured after Nikola Tesla invented the Radio in 1900.
Change my mind. Send me a link to a PDF of the "impossible" power supply. I'm waiting. Since you claim it is patented, there should be no problem with "secrets" or "disclosure", since that's what patents do, is disclose.
The laws of thermodynamics aren't suggestions — they're PHYSICAL LAWS!
The distributed solar point is worth holding onto here — the IEA scenarios may be underestimating how much cheap solar is already moving outside official statistics. In East Africa right now, roughly 85% of Chinese solar panel imports are going to rooftop and off-grid systems that don't show up in grid capacity figures. Tanzania officially reports around 6 MW of grid-connected solar while having over 1 million solar-powered homes. If that undercounting is systematic, the growth trajectory for affordable power access could be faster than the scenarios suggest — though you're right that without economic growth, cheaper electrons alone won't close the gap.
Great article Hannah. Personally, I don't see any value in looking at IEA forecasts more than three years out. Their models are too simple to produce reasonable forecasts.
There's diminishing returns for sure with this metric, but there is a minimum level that allows for provision of basic services. I think you are taking the degrowth idea a bit too far suggesting that Africa should consider degrowth, even though this is definitely valid in developed countries.
All true. That's an excellent summary of the narrative of progress that most of us live by.
In a civilization that measures success and quality of life by the amount of novel goods, services, and comforts people have access to, energy and material throughput are directly tied to prosperity. We can see where that leads in the chart Hannah posted about the IEA's projections for energy use in 2050.
Alleviation of extreme poverty for everyone, I agree, is of utmost importance. And for that, we must understand how poverty evolved.
An anthropological investigation reveals that the Hobbesian view of humanity (nasty, brutish, short) was born of a time and place (17th century England) that had awful living conditions. We modern people, with the help of the Steven Pinkers of the world, have extrapolated that to mean that life was always miserable and we needed civilization to save us from suffering. This is not the case, and modern civilization likely created many of the conditions for extreme poverty and suffering to arise. This is not to say that going backwards is the answer—it's not even possible. It's to say that we should question the notion that technological progress, which created extreme inequality, is the solution. There isn't room to go into further detail here.
I understand where you're coming from. I truly do. We need more people thinking and acting on this stuff. There's no higher calling.
I did a thought experiment for Cuba: 3.4 million households, about 75% of them single-family. A $600 solar plus battery package would give the single family homes as much electricity as they get now from a failing grid, and the 20% reduction in national oil purchases for the national grid would pay for it in about 3-1/2 years. 2 500W panels @$60 each (Chinese prices, FOB + shipping), a 24V 100Ah battery ($260--Amazon), charge controller $50, inverter $110, plus balance of system. That would be enough for lighting, fans, refrigeration, and light appliances.
You are aware, of course, that the plight of Cuba lies less with its form of governance than it does with being blockaded for over SEVEN DECADES by the biggest bully on the planet — a supposedly "free" country?
The only people "free" in the US are those at the top. All systems of governance fail when the greedy are in charge.
It was a thought experiment about solar, with no implications regarding the worth of the Cuban government or quality of life of the Cuban people. Minimal solar in Africa can be even less expensive, since you can get lighting, fans, and phone charging with DC only--no need for an inverter. But Cuba already has a grid and things that plug into it, however much the grid is failing for lack of oil (and maintenance).
Africans can make their own decisions. If they want to retain their existing culture and live in energy poverty, that is their right.
Europeans making decisions about what Africans should or should not do is definitionally racist. Giving Africans money has not worked for the last 100 years.
Hi Jan -- send me and email address and I'll send you the information you seek on resonance - as it is all contained in text / spreadsheets / visual graphs on both series and parallel resonance and their output to input calcs - availabe in the 27 page chapter on Resonance in one textbook;
--- "Basic Electronics" now in it's 13th edition, authored by Mr. Bernard Grob and also in Electricity 1-7 edited by Mr. Harry Mileaf.
I'm dubious about all this electricity growth, even while fossil sunlight goes into decline.
Most people have no idea how dependent the grid is on fossil sunlight.
I purposely moved to a place with abundant hydropower. I live three kilometres from a 37 megawatt hydro generator.
On Christmas Eve, 2025, the power went down. After a few boring hours without lights, heat, or computer, I went looking for the problem. It was less than one kilometre from my house.
A tree had come down against a power pole, snapping it off at its base. This was next to a river, and the wires were dangling in the water.
They had to build a road to get the pole truck there! There were SIX pieces of diesel heavy equipment there! And that didn't include what I estimate was three diesel truckloads of gravel to build the makeshift road.
We were without power for 29 hours, well into Christmas day. People who were dependent on heat pumps abandoned their homes to stay with friends and relatives who still had electricity.
You hear a lot of noise about so-called "renewable" energy. That exclusively produces electricity. There are no batteries capable of powering mining, long-haul transportation, heavy equipment, and agriculture.
Without diesel, there will be no functional electric grid.
re “There are no batteries capable of powering mining, long-haul transportation, heavy equipment, and agriculture.” Actually there is increasingly is; especially in China.
Just do a search, there is quite a bit if it out there. Even predictions thay in 2028 electric trucks will outsell diesel ones in China. So the world is moving fast. Obvioulsy physics is physics, but within that there have been and continue to be better and better batteries, plus the systems that surround trucks are changing. Below is just what I got from a simple google search re what is happening re electric truck sales in China. Enjoy!
"The number of electric trucks on Chinese roads is increasing rapidly, with the industry shifting from a marginal presence to a dominant position within a very short timeframe. In December 2025, electric heavy-duty trucks (including battery-electric and battery-swap models) outsold diesel trucks for the first time, accounting for 54% of total heavy-duty truck sales that month.Here are the key details of this expansion:Explosive Growth: Sales of heavy-duty electric trucks (16 tons and above) increased 134% between 2023 and 2024, with that trend continuing into 2025. Total new energy truck registrations surpassed 231,000 units in 2025, a 182% increase compared to 2024.High Market Penetration: In the first half of 2025, battery-electric trucks captured 22% of the heavy-duty market, up from 8.6% in the same period in 2024. By the end of 2025, electric trucks were expected to make up 45% of new sales for the year.Driving Factors: The surge is driven by a combination of government "dual carbon" policies, high-volume government subsidies for battery-swapping infrastructure, and lower total cost of ownership compared to diesel models.Key Sectors: Electric truck adoption is particularly strong in short-haul, industrial, and heavy-dumping applications, such as coal transport in provinces like Shanxi and Inner Mongolia.Infrastructure Support: Battery-swapping technology, which allows trucks to swap depleted batteries for fully charged ones in a matter of minutes, has been crucial to this growth, with over 25,400 swap-capable vehicles sold in the first half of 2025.Projections suggest that electric vehicles could constitute half of all Chinese truck sales by 2028."
Agreed - a world where Africa stays poor while the world achieves net zero, as an African is no better than a world where Africans have access to electricity and are lifted out of poverty but the world fails to achieve reduce carbon emissions.
Asia increased electricity access by expanding coal fired power, not intermittent renewable power which saves fuel costs intermittently.
Interesting that low-income population data in the OWID "Population" post https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-unwpp?country=~OWID_LIC, which uses UN data, is totally different from the low-income population data in the figure in this post which uses World Bank data. And clues as to why would be much appreciated.
I believe the difference is that one graph counts person-level poverty while the other counts nation-level average income. India is low-middle country (so not included in your linked chart), but it does have a significant number of people in poverty (who would be included in the article chart).
Africa needs to look at old school Iranian low-tech ways of cooling things down. Cob based rotary windmills, housing that cools itself down up to 25° through thermal work, etc.
I work in Climate. The reality is that energy poverty is more dangerous and harmful than higher co2 emissions. Even though i work in climate, i believe we need to have much more oil for many years, atleast oil is better than coal.
"The reality is that energy poverty is more dangerous and harmful than higher co2 emissions."
Please provide your evidence.
To Vote4worldpeace — would you change your mind about wnating moe oil — if you were made aware that a solid-state elecric powere supply, invented in 1982 / professional laboratory successfully tested in 1984 / US Patented in 1992- “finally” being privately developed for mass production and installation.
This is the case: because some engineeers finally realized tht they had been lied to when they were taught that how the cicuitry works “was impossible” - because the World had been using the same electic power supply circuit: used exactly the same way as the resonating receiver circuit found in the billion of radios manufactured after Nikola Tesla invented the Radio in 1900.
—-
As a retired electrical engineer, I call BS.
Change my mind. Send me a link to a PDF of the "impossible" power supply. I'm waiting. Since you claim it is patented, there should be no problem with "secrets" or "disclosure", since that's what patents do, is disclose.
The laws of thermodynamics aren't suggestions — they're PHYSICAL LAWS!
The distributed solar point is worth holding onto here — the IEA scenarios may be underestimating how much cheap solar is already moving outside official statistics. In East Africa right now, roughly 85% of Chinese solar panel imports are going to rooftop and off-grid systems that don't show up in grid capacity figures. Tanzania officially reports around 6 MW of grid-connected solar while having over 1 million solar-powered homes. If that undercounting is systematic, the growth trajectory for affordable power access could be faster than the scenarios suggest — though you're right that without economic growth, cheaper electrons alone won't close the gap.
brilliant, Professor!!!
Great article Hannah. Personally, I don't see any value in looking at IEA forecasts more than three years out. Their models are too simple to produce reasonable forecasts.
Thank you, Hannah. This is why you're the best.
So many people talk about "bad" things that might happen in the future, ignoring all the horrors of crushing poverty that are occurring right now - things we can actually do something about. https://www.mattball.org/2025/01/taking-armageddon-seriously-kicking-off.html
What if we're chasing the wrong goal? What if energy use per person is not the metric for success?
There's diminishing returns for sure with this metric, but there is a minimum level that allows for provision of basic services. I think you are taking the degrowth idea a bit too far suggesting that Africa should consider degrowth, even though this is definitely valid in developed countries.
I'm not suggesting degrowth in Africa. I'm suggesting a wide-boundary systems approach rather than reductionism.
All true. That's an excellent summary of the narrative of progress that most of us live by.
In a civilization that measures success and quality of life by the amount of novel goods, services, and comforts people have access to, energy and material throughput are directly tied to prosperity. We can see where that leads in the chart Hannah posted about the IEA's projections for energy use in 2050.
Alleviation of extreme poverty for everyone, I agree, is of utmost importance. And for that, we must understand how poverty evolved.
An anthropological investigation reveals that the Hobbesian view of humanity (nasty, brutish, short) was born of a time and place (17th century England) that had awful living conditions. We modern people, with the help of the Steven Pinkers of the world, have extrapolated that to mean that life was always miserable and we needed civilization to save us from suffering. This is not the case, and modern civilization likely created many of the conditions for extreme poverty and suffering to arise. This is not to say that going backwards is the answer—it's not even possible. It's to say that we should question the notion that technological progress, which created extreme inequality, is the solution. There isn't room to go into further detail here.
I understand where you're coming from. I truly do. We need more people thinking and acting on this stuff. There's no higher calling.
Best wishes.
I did a thought experiment for Cuba: 3.4 million households, about 75% of them single-family. A $600 solar plus battery package would give the single family homes as much electricity as they get now from a failing grid, and the 20% reduction in national oil purchases for the national grid would pay for it in about 3-1/2 years. 2 500W panels @$60 each (Chinese prices, FOB + shipping), a 24V 100Ah battery ($260--Amazon), charge controller $50, inverter $110, plus balance of system. That would be enough for lighting, fans, refrigeration, and light appliances.
You are aware, of course, that the plight of Cuba lies less with its form of governance than it does with being blockaded for over SEVEN DECADES by the biggest bully on the planet — a supposedly "free" country?
The only people "free" in the US are those at the top. All systems of governance fail when the greedy are in charge.
It was a thought experiment about solar, with no implications regarding the worth of the Cuban government or quality of life of the Cuban people. Minimal solar in Africa can be even less expensive, since you can get lighting, fans, and phone charging with DC only--no need for an inverter. But Cuba already has a grid and things that plug into it, however much the grid is failing for lack of oil (and maintenance).
For how this could apply to Africa, see:
https://climatedrift.substack.com/p/why-solarpunk-is-already-happening
Scaling up electricity access for Africa is one of the core challenges of the century, and solar and batteries will be critical.
Don't bet on it.
Will do.
Africans can make their own decisions. If they want to retain their existing culture and live in energy poverty, that is their right.
Europeans making decisions about what Africans should or should not do is definitionally racist. Giving Africans money has not worked for the last 100 years.
Hi Jan -- send me and email address and I'll send you the information you seek on resonance - as it is all contained in text / spreadsheets / visual graphs on both series and parallel resonance and their output to input calcs - availabe in the 27 page chapter on Resonance in one textbook;
--- "Basic Electronics" now in it's 13th edition, authored by Mr. Bernard Grob and also in Electricity 1-7 edited by Mr. Harry Mileaf.
My email address is scotsman7@comcast.net
Hope to hear from you soon - as I am putting up the info.
Will do.
I'm dubious about all this electricity growth, even while fossil sunlight goes into decline.
Most people have no idea how dependent the grid is on fossil sunlight.
I purposely moved to a place with abundant hydropower. I live three kilometres from a 37 megawatt hydro generator.
On Christmas Eve, 2025, the power went down. After a few boring hours without lights, heat, or computer, I went looking for the problem. It was less than one kilometre from my house.
A tree had come down against a power pole, snapping it off at its base. This was next to a river, and the wires were dangling in the water.
They had to build a road to get the pole truck there! There were SIX pieces of diesel heavy equipment there! And that didn't include what I estimate was three diesel truckloads of gravel to build the makeshift road.
We were without power for 29 hours, well into Christmas day. People who were dependent on heat pumps abandoned their homes to stay with friends and relatives who still had electricity.
You hear a lot of noise about so-called "renewable" energy. That exclusively produces electricity. There are no batteries capable of powering mining, long-haul transportation, heavy equipment, and agriculture.
Without diesel, there will be no functional electric grid.
re “There are no batteries capable of powering mining, long-haul transportation, heavy equipment, and agriculture.” Actually there is increasingly is; especially in China.
Do you have any references?
I follow this quite closely, and know of no such thing. Physics is the same in China as it is in North America.
I suspect there may be a demo project here and there that has not proven to be competitive with diesel.
Just do a search, there is quite a bit if it out there. Even predictions thay in 2028 electric trucks will outsell diesel ones in China. So the world is moving fast. Obvioulsy physics is physics, but within that there have been and continue to be better and better batteries, plus the systems that surround trucks are changing. Below is just what I got from a simple google search re what is happening re electric truck sales in China. Enjoy!
"The number of electric trucks on Chinese roads is increasing rapidly, with the industry shifting from a marginal presence to a dominant position within a very short timeframe. In December 2025, electric heavy-duty trucks (including battery-electric and battery-swap models) outsold diesel trucks for the first time, accounting for 54% of total heavy-duty truck sales that month.Here are the key details of this expansion:Explosive Growth: Sales of heavy-duty electric trucks (16 tons and above) increased 134% between 2023 and 2024, with that trend continuing into 2025. Total new energy truck registrations surpassed 231,000 units in 2025, a 182% increase compared to 2024.High Market Penetration: In the first half of 2025, battery-electric trucks captured 22% of the heavy-duty market, up from 8.6% in the same period in 2024. By the end of 2025, electric trucks were expected to make up 45% of new sales for the year.Driving Factors: The surge is driven by a combination of government "dual carbon" policies, high-volume government subsidies for battery-swapping infrastructure, and lower total cost of ownership compared to diesel models.Key Sectors: Electric truck adoption is particularly strong in short-haul, industrial, and heavy-dumping applications, such as coal transport in provinces like Shanxi and Inner Mongolia.Infrastructure Support: Battery-swapping technology, which allows trucks to swap depleted batteries for fully charged ones in a matter of minutes, has been crucial to this growth, with over 25,400 swap-capable vehicles sold in the first half of 2025.Projections suggest that electric vehicles could constitute half of all Chinese truck sales by 2028."
Agreed - a world where Africa stays poor while the world achieves net zero, as an African is no better than a world where Africans have access to electricity and are lifted out of poverty but the world fails to achieve reduce carbon emissions.
Asia increased electricity access by expanding coal fired power, not intermittent renewable power which saves fuel costs intermittently.
This is a great overview! Thanks Hannah
Interesting that low-income population data in the OWID "Population" post https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-unwpp?country=~OWID_LIC, which uses UN data, is totally different from the low-income population data in the figure in this post which uses World Bank data. And clues as to why would be much appreciated.
I believe the difference is that one graph counts person-level poverty while the other counts nation-level average income. India is low-middle country (so not included in your linked chart), but it does have a significant number of people in poverty (who would be included in the article chart).
Africa needs to look at old school Iranian low-tech ways of cooling things down. Cob based rotary windmills, housing that cools itself down up to 25° through thermal work, etc.
https://substack.com/@thelastfarm/note/p-191029659?r=2x166&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action