Off-grid solar brings light, time and income to remotest villages

1. Solar Home sets range from $5 flashlights with solarcells to $150 home lights+panels+phonecharger+radio to $400 sets with TV. The more expensive sets are usually paid off over time.

2. The impact of even the smallest flashlights on human wellbeing is enormous. You may imagine a village in the third world has a cosy campfire. But in truth it is usually too much effort to collect the wood, so people live in the dark half the day. The mentioned kerosine lamps are already a luxury to many. Having a flashlight so you can spot the snakes and spiders when you go outside at night to have a pee, or make sure you do not slip is life saving. Having a 100lumen light in your bedroom so you can see faintly your wife or husband while you have sex is amazing.

3. So this is about improving well-being. Not industrialising. These solar home systems do not significantly make people wealthier or more likely to become wealthy. It just makes them 20% happier. You need significantly more and cheaper power to start a factory. For that, "Commercial and Industrial solar" is a big deal. Where companies in India/Africa/Indonesia buy $10-30k worth of solar panels + battery + inverter to make sure their factories are always powered. Cost of up-front capital and competing with subsidised energy makes this not always a no-brainer.

4. Grid expansion is... expensive. I do not think we'll see the grid covering everywhere by the end of this century. And microgrids are great, but also expensive. How expensive? Consider that connecting your house to the grid in a developed country costs about $10k. Companies have been able to connect villages under the grid for about $1500 per house. Microgrids (with all their limitations) can sometimes do it for $700. If you consider that a household makes anywhere between $100 and $700 per year, then you see that the only way to be able to do this is with heavy subsidies (development aid) from foreign countries. And then you still need to pay for the actual power and maintain the grid. If that costs $300/household/year, and the household makes less per year, then your economics go nowhere.

One more thing: A related problem that affects the same population is that of clean cooking. Poor people (women) cook on wood or charcoal instead of electricity or gas. Arguably this is the worst problem in the world (yes worse than war, natural disasters, HIV, Malaria and all other diseases together) as millions of people die from it each year. Solutions are similar: Selling small gas stoves.

Tl dr; The real problem with energy poverty is that the people it is trying to reach are unimaginably poor. Way poorer than that great grandfather of yours that grew up in poverty. Solve poverty and you solve energy.

1) Large power plants + transmission + charging your electric car + driving your wheels is usually more efficient than small ICE engines.

2) Even if the grid is dirty, if many cars are electric, once we make the grid cleaner, those cars automatically become cleaner. Otherwise, we would have to replace grid power generation & cars both.

3) Power plants are (usually) far from population centers, ICE cars spew exhaust everywhere, all the time.

Electrification of cars is a net good. All the time.

Power load smoothing, emergency backup. I been through a couple of natural disasters, and you quickly realize storage of power is just as key as power generation.

Some of the biggest suppliers are only paying ~4p to feed in compared to the average price of 34p per kWh.

This is wrong, however a common misconception.

There are really two reasons you would want to replace an ICE with an EV. One is that electricity can be green, but the other is that an EV is a lot more efficient. Your ICE is not just burning fossil fuels, it also uses them mostly to produce hot air and only a fraction of the energy ends up in turning the wheel. ICEs are so inefficient that it's practically impossible to have grid electricity so dirty that the ICE would win.