Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task
tl;dr Connecting new power generation to the electricity grid is a queue-based permit system that is stupid and slow, but simple and supremely stable. There is a decent chunk of renewable power “in the queue” but speeding up the connection process risks damaging stability.<p>The article notes India’s electrification as a partial counter-example: relatively fast, but correspondingly relatively unstable. (One marker mentioned was “kerosene liters consumed”, as a proxy for how much lighting has been replaced by electricity, they note the amount dropped from 9 billion liters to 2 billion liters, which I take as a <i>very</i> rough indicator of ~80% grid reliability - not even one “9“ of stability. It’s hard to find representative data on developed-world power grid reliability but for instance there is a common estimate that the average Australian resident experiences 200 minutes of power outage per year, which corresponds to somewhere above three-and-a-half 9s and below four 9s. This suggests potentially quite an extreme cost in stability for the moderate benefit of speeding up queue times for renewable power.)