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
Power planets are very expensive to build and a lot of take a long time to buil. Hydroelectric that do not need any fuel require enormous dams that take are expensive and take a long time to build. Cheapr and faster to build power plans like gas turbines need a constant supply of fuel.
Third world countries have in general quite fast population growth and urbanisation with more and more electrical power requirement. This make it quite hard to build up the electrical grid and power production fast enough.
Pople are willing to pay but the question is how much. Just the money you pay for the electricity is not enough you need money to build the infrastructure upfront. The time to pay it off typically years or decades and that money need to come from somewhere. Third world countries are not the best and paying back loans, there is a lot of corruption etc so investing in power plans are quite risky
Look at Ethiopia where the GDP was $192 billion 2024, they are building a large hydroelectric power plant at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Dam#Two_dams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Dam#Two_dams) the cost in 2016 was $5 billion or 7% of the GDP.
If you compare it to the US that has a $23 trillion it is a infrastructure investment equal to $1.6 trillion for the US. The US federal budget is $6.1 trillion of which $3.8 trillion is mandatory spending, $1.7 is discretionary spending and $0.7 trillion is net interest.
The discretionary spending what is netoated each year, defense is the larges power of $0.8 trillion. This mean the cost of the dame for Ethiopia is relative to the economy twithce what US spend on defence in a year.
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