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Dear Sir,
Daniel Den-Ami should be applauded for his prognosis on the critical importance of affordable energy for those communities around the world for whom reasonable living standards are still a distant dream. But his prescription is more likely to exacerbate this condition than provide a cure.

For it is the poorest communities in the world that are most impacted by climate change. This is one issue – perhaps the only one – on which development organisations such as Oxfam and Christian Aid and the World Bank agree. What’s more, the cheapest way of connecting communities isn’t the centralised fossil-heavy grids that we have relied upon in developed countries, but, local, solar, distributed generation and micro-grids that are so well-suited to these communities in the predominantly sunny parts of the world. It is precisely in these regions where solar PV is now often the cheapest form of power.

We wouldn’t think of encouraging the world’s poor to adopt landline telephony now that mobile technology exists. Why promote an expensive, dirty technology when the alternative is cleaner, more flexible and now cheaper.

Yours
Seb Beloe