IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cge/wacage/814.html

The Global Electrification Frontier and Climate Change

Author

Listed:
  • Burgess, Robin

    (Department of Economics, LSE)

  • Greenstone, Michael

    (Department of Economics, University of Chicago)

  • Ryan, Nicholas

    (Department of Economics, Yale University)

  • Sudarshan, Anant

    (Department of Economics, University of Warwick)

Abstract

Off-grid solar promises a low-cost and carbon-free path to electrification. But will poor households choose off-grid power? We run a multi-year pricing experiment in rural India to estimate demand over all electricity sources, including off-grid solar, diesel generators, and both formal and informal connections to the grid. We find that off grid solar is an important stop-gap, but households value grid electrification five times more. The grid, however, decreases global surplus, both because household payments do not cover the cost of supply, in an environment with high informality, and because grid connections increase carbon damages. We apply our model to data from Africa and find a similarly strong preference for the grid among households there, underscoring the external validity of our results.

Suggested Citation

  • Burgess, Robin & Greenstone, Michael & Ryan, Nicholas & Sudarshan, Anant, 2026. "The Global Electrification Frontier and Climate Change," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 814, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:814
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/wp814.2026.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:814. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jane Snape (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.