Eli5: Why is it so difficult for third-world countries to provide stable electricity to their citizens despite the technology being so abundant?

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The technology is readily available, people will pay to have access to it. Yet, a lot of people still don’t have this technology made available to them.

In: Economics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Infrastructure is a multi-tiered problem that requires constant investment. Generating the electricity is rarely the problem. It’s delivering it. Electricity needs to be generated in bulk and then physically transferred to every single home via a physical cable. There’s alot that can go wrong from point A to point B. You need a working grid that can distribute power across a whole area, and the sections need to be intertwined so that if one source of energy falls behind on production, another can step up. The grid needs to be flexible to rapid changes in power use that occur throughout the day. And then there’s what you do when something goes wrong. If a power line fails, you need a robust response system to respond to the incident quickly to fix it. That means you need a large staff on standby. It also means you need roads that are accessible to commercial vehicles. All of the equipment on the grid occasionally needs to get fixed, replaced, and upgraded, which adds up when you’re supplying a grid to millions of people. The technology is not the problem. The logistics are.

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