Comment by jmward01
1 month ago
Actually, solar and other renewables are making it easy to skip legacy hydrocarbon based infrastructure and the 'developing world' (not the west) is snapping it up [1]. Additionally, the big problem countries aren't really the developing world. China is rapidly hitting its targets and other than a brief moment where they threw up a lot of coal fired generation to meet immediate demand it looks like they will very rapidly decarbonize in the coming years and start having so much excess renewable energy that they will pay people to use it for manufacturing [2][3].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/climate/solar-south-afric...
[2] https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/g...
[3]https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/23/china-hits-1-tw-solar...
I wonder if we will see more DC grids. You can get a decent 5 - 20% efficiency improvement out of it as most end user devices are DC now.
Might be most devices by count, but certainly not by power consumption. EVs are the only major appliance that’s DC, and most people don’t even have them.