A fascinating takeaway from that video for me... If you take the US land that is dedicated to growing corn for ethanol that is put in gasoline, and replace all the corn on that land with solar panels, how much energy would it produce? Twice today's total electrical generation in the US, from all sources. And that's in the corn belt, which is far from ideal for solar. It would be billions of panels, but it's a pretty interesting perspective on the questions about the land use requirements of solar.

Extensive deployment of renewables and battery storage is perhaps the best thing that can be done anywhere (even in developed countries) for making the grid more robust. Not only is there no fuel supply to be cut off, targets become too diffuse and decentralized to take out quickly, especially if you can manage to cover 30-40% of cities with rooftop solar.

I think of him as known for his thoughts on the “color” brown.

It also illustrates the importance of not getting caught on the wrong side of the global hegemon right next door who can choke you out and prevent you from importing energy and integrating with the global economy.

A lot of food for thought all around.

> At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches."

Much of the developing world is close enough to the equator that solar and batteries just have to last a few days.

In most developed countries solar is seasonal.

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