Developed nations need to tackle this problem and solve it.
The amount of investment being called for is not insignificant: US $65-86 billion per year between now and 2030. That would result, apparently, in complete rural electrification and clean stoves for all who currently lack them. Without policy, evidently the number of people lacking electricity and clean cooking will actually increase.
This in addition to the obvious: electricity vastly increases quality of life. A beautiful example of that is given by William Kamkwamba in his wonderful book, The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. A few lights in his family's hut allowed children to study at night--something they'd never been able to do before.
A major concern with increasing global energy consumption is the impact on the atmosphere. The referenced study finds that their approach would have a negligible impact on global climate change. They do appear to have overlooked one effect of current practices, the Asia Brown Cloud: combustion of low-quality conventional fuels (wood, dung) creates high particulate concentrations, which has tended to result in local cooling over the affected areas. So cleaning this up might actually increase global warming! More study is needed.
We must remember that the problem the study is addressing is not the sum total of increasing global energy demands. Food production must increase to keep pace with the growing population; food production requires significant energy inputs. The demand for water, both for agriculture and human consumption, will also increase. Energy is required to move water. As a friend says, "Food, energy and water are one thing."
In my blog about new activities in outer space, there have been many recent posts about off-Earth mining and expanding the global economy into the solar system. A recurring theme has been using space resources to construct space solar power stations. Those would provide completely clean, global-warming-free energy to the Earth from geosynchronous orbit, in the form of microwaves which are converted to electricity.
SPS-ALPHA: The First Practical Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large PHased Array
John Mankins
Artemis Innovation Management Solutions
Artemis Innovation Management Solutions
The stations on Earth where the power is received need to be large--several kilometers on a side. This is to keep the power per unit area in the beam low enough that it wouldn't harm a person or animal who strayed into the beam. Clearly, these receiving stations should go where there is no human habitation--such as the Sahara, Gobi, and Great Indian deserts. Interestingly, those are no too distant from the disadvantaged populations who need energy and clean cooking.
There is no way that space solar power stations will be in operation by 2030. First, industry must develop a space resources processing capability. That's because it would be far too expensive to launch all the needed materials from Earth to build the stations. But from water ice and dust on the Moon and asteroids, the necessary construction materials and fuel for building can be obtained affordably. This industry might have progressed to a small-scale state by 2030.
In another generation, though--say 2060--space solar power could perhaps be the dominant source of energy for non-mobile applications.
The developed nations should plan to move forward with more conventional approaches, but make them synergistic with the long-term goal of receiving energy from space. Transmission and distribution networks for rural electrification would certainly have this synergism.
Once the processing of off-Earth resources is fully underway, the $65-86 billion per year needed to electrify the rest of the world will seem like a trivial amount. Space resources are plentiful and valuable.
