The electric fast-track for emerging markets

There are two dominant views on energy and development – the fossil view and the climate view.

The fossil gradualist view holds that the world built its wealth on fossil fuels and that any departure from this proven path carries greater risks and costs: the implied conclusion is that emerging economies should be encouraged to follow the same route.

The climate view tends to accept the primacy of fossils in development, and layers onto it the argument that climate-vulnerable nations did not cause the problem they are being asked to absorb and should not have to pay the price to fix it. Implicit in this framing is that the electric path comes at a premium relative to the fossil one.

Both views seem to agree on one thing: that building prosperity without fossil fuels is costlier and slower.

Rapid changes in technology now undermine that assumption. This report presents a third perspective: the electrotech view. It argues that electric technologies (such as solar, batteries and electric vehicles) are winning in emerging markets because they are cheaper and better suited to local needs. Small emerging economies are already at the frontier of electrotech uptake across supply, demand and connections: Namibia (35%) and Togo (18%) lead in solar generation, Jordan and Kyrgyzstan in battery sales, and Nepal (70%) and Sri Lanka (64%) in EV uptake.

Our analysis shows that 46% of CVF nations, measured by electricity demand, have leapfrogged the United States in solar penetration, and about 51% have surpassed it in economy-wide electrification.