Reliable, Cheap & Abundant Electricity For All - 24-7
Reliable, cheap, abundant energy is at the heart of industrial process, and it is essential for economic development.
In 1990, 67% of people in China lived in extreme poverty.
By 2010, this figure had fallen to 11%. And today, it is less than 1%. This rate of progress is unprecedented in human history.
A key factor of this progress has been industrialisation, a vital component of which in turn has been the construction of energy infrastructure.
In other words, burning coal.
Reliable, cheap, abundant energy is at the heart of industrial process, and it is essential for economic development.
Energy is required to power factories, offices, transport infrastructure, agriculture, schools and hospitals. Without it, the economy shuts down, and people are left again to subsistence. Poverty.
In 2019, a power cut in the UK left a million homes without electricity. It left people on trains stranded on lines and in tunnels. And it caused widespread chaos throughout the transport network.
The continuous supply of cheap energy is taken for granted in the west. So much so, that a power cut that lasted for most people, just minutes, became headlines. Yet this short episode is daily life for many millions of people.
The relationship between a continuous supply of energy and all forms of progress is now well understood.
Yet today more than half a billion people – a population larger than the European Union – most of whom live in Sub Saharan Africa, still exist in extreme poverty and without access to electricity.
Rather than demanding the rapid deployment of energy infrastructure, to allow people to develop enterprises, many campaigning NGOs have instead demanded ‘sustainable’ alternatives.
They have lobbied for restrictions in private finance for overseas projects, ringfenced aid and development budgets, and to require indebted countries meet environmental goals as part of their debt-relief programmes.
This has robbed people and governments of the means to develop infrastructure according to their own needs, and according to well-understood principles of economic development.
And it has robbed people of the freedom to exploit their own natural resources for their own benefit.
This is not a situation that would be tolerated in more developed economies. The loss of power supply and its economic consequences would quickly lead to political change.