Connecting two billion people is a challenge of implementation, not invention. Entrepreneurship, market forces, channels of product distribution and credit systems - this is the vocabulary of implementation. The history of a solar century will be writte in the language of commerce, as well as technology. We have to rapidly expand the off-grid solar which has been shown to work in regions of Kenya and Morocco, South Africa, Mexico, India, and Zimbabwe, China, and throughout Central America and the Caribbean. Even in the US electricity generated with renewable, PV systems feeding into electric grids, and biomass from agricultural residues or energy plantations, are making strides.
First scientists have to talk to scientists.
Science is the lingua franca . Eventually their shared perceptions creep out and infect government policy and public opinion. But we need something that goes a little faster and a little farther than a twenty-year program of informal seepage. They would than hold a series of meetings with key scientific and government leadership of those countries to talk and work through the solar vs. fossil issue in the country's development plans. The Rockefeller Foundation is willing to make available its conference center at Bellagio in Italy for such a series of conferences if that will facilitate them.