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
A length of copper cable usually isn’t worth stealing in the 1st world, whereas in developing countries, the money gained from selling it keeps you fed for a day or two. Gets crazy sometimes: In Kenya, transformer oil was often drained and got used by street vendors to fry their chips or whatever else they peddled cuz it lasted longer than regular cooking oil. Didn’t bother anybody much that this particular oil contains carcinogens and is definitely not for human consumption. And of course, a transformer without oil will blow – another street or two without electricity.
Out power grid is paid for by users, and much of our economy is supported by taxes. Theres a minimum standard pur leaders must provide for the income to keep happening.
Some countries have whats known as the resource curse. The leaders get their primary funding by extracting resources. Things important to this process will have reliable power, roads, water etc. Its just that tax paying citizens aren’t a requirement for this system, so the people aren’t a priority.
[It has been suggested that more than 20% of the total electricity generated in India is stolen. ](https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201644)
The power grid is not only generators and wires, it’s infrastructure, built in redundancy, and responsible management. A mud slide in a third world country can cause a lot of damage to infrastructure and power grids. If a town has only one road in and out, it can be difficult and expensive to restore power. A first world country would have multiple roads servicing each community, and would just helicopter parts in if they had to, but that’s expensive for a third world country. Add to that corruption, insurgency attacks, annual natural weather patters, like cyclone season, flood season, etc.. it can be near impossible to ensure consistent service.
It’s kind of like [cell phone service in Canada](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cm09bkcn175j7x6gwx4r9/cellcoveragecanada.png?rlkey=ax1avkfzcg327jurdtx1nqtk4&dl=0). Look at the coverage percentages here. Despite not being ‘third world’, many people rely on satellite service, and more recently, Skylink because Canada is vast, and most of the paying customers live within 100 miles of the southern border. The paying customers in the northern areas couldn’t pay the bills for cell towers and infrastructure in a thousand years, so you have cell coverage around the cities, along the trans Canada highway, in national parks, but the rest of the country is on it’s own.
To add another wrinkle to the discussion, developing economies often start using more power faster than their existing grids can provide. Household incomes can increase to the point a family can afford an AC unit and AC units consume much more power than a few fans in the home. Multiply that by an entire neighborhood’s worth of AC units and in one summer that neighborhood will exceed the limits of the existing grid. The same applies to businesses and industries that might be bottlenecked from making capital investments to grow. So you get into a chicken/egg scenario where the money for expensive infrastructure investment isn’t available to equitably grow the grid for everyone and the economy can’t grow and expand the tax base or afford the fees without that infrastructure investment.
There isn’t enough energy on tap to power everyone to first world conditions. We simply don’t make enough right now, so poorer countries have to deal with what they get.
Staffing and maintenance.
The United States is actually facing an energy crisis right now that nobody knows about. A lot of power plants are run through tribal knowledge, AKA “this is how we’ve always done it.” The issue is that a massive amount of that knowledge is stored in the older heads running those plants, and they’re about to retire. That means all that knowledge will effectively poof out of existence.
Third-world countries don’t even have the old hands available that we do. They can’t coax Jim out of retirement and ask him to help run a power plant until the staff is properly trained.
Abundant does not equal free. This infrastructure is expensive, and many countries can’t afford it.
I live in Costa Rica with constant power disruptions. We do not have an issue with generating the power, that we have in abundance. Our issue is the power lines. During dry season we have forest fires, during rainy season torrential downpours and landslides. We have trees taking out lines all the time. We are in a ver seismic zone, so earthquakes take out lines. Monkeys often get fried on the transformers. We also don’t have a lot of police that manage traffic violations, I have seen more than once drunk drivers take out utility poles.
These are just some of the challanges we face here.
Depends on which country we are talking. Switzerland for example has quite stable electric grid.
Latest Answers