Videos:

Transcript:

You know, two to two and half billion people really don't have dependable light at night and how do they secure it today, they secure it through candles, kerosene lanterns, dry cell batteries, maybe if there's you know, enough capital to combine you can get a diesel generator but that's much rare. Generally at the household scale, it's going to be what I just described, candles, kerosine lanterns, dry cell battery driven light. Those technologies or those approaches to having light at night for the poor in rural areas of the world are expensive, dangerous, polluting, right, thousands of people die every year kicking over kerosine lanterns and burning to death, breathing in the fumes. I mean it's nasty stuff. Candles are expensive. If you look at the cost per kilowatt hour of generating light with dry cell batteries, it's enormously expensive, again it follows the logic that the poor typically get the worse stuff, the poor gets screwed is really what it comes down to. They get the worse stuff and the most expensive stuff, they pay a lot more than we do in absolute terms and if you say in relative terms relative to their income, it's obscene, right. So they're really badly served as a result, so why can't we as western capitalist, we've got all the solar technology, all the stuff you know and yeah okay it doesn't compete today given all of the perverse subsidies for fossil fuels against grid generated electricity with coal as a fuels or whatever, okay fine, great but look at the base of the pyramid where you know people are paying exorbitant amounts of money just for light at night, solar is very competitive today, it is.