> This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do.

The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them.

It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment.

Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement.

It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.

Unlike the US, Vietnam is a net importer of fuel. It imports over 40 million tons of coal per year:

https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/

It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023.

But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own.

"Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024)

https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-v...

In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared.

As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures.

In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025.

These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.

The transition is happening rapidly in Pakistan: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan...

That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.

We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.

Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.

[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=202...

Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.

> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power

That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.

Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.

Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].

I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.

[1] https://www.idahopower.com/energy-environment/energy/energy-...