What About Wearable Solar PV?

Frequent commenter and senior energy analyst Glenn Doty writes about an earlier post on wearable solar PV (see picture on left featuring the obligatory pretty girl).  He notes: (This) is likely a fad that will contribute absolutely nothing to the net emissions problem. 

Oh, you’re 100% right about the emissions issue, but wearable PV can make a huge difference to those in the rural parts of the developing world who have to spend hours per day walking to the nearest city to charge their cell phones. This is a big deal for several reasons:

• It mitigates human suffering in and of itself, i.e., the hours spent walking to and from cities for no other purpose, and the loss of personal productivity associated with that.

• A tiny bit of convenient electricity has the potential to bring access to information (via the Internet) to literally a billion people who desperately need education. As I’ve written extensively, educated women don’t have 15 – 20 children, thus this is a route to greatly reduced population growth.

Does Internet access imply a good education? Of course not. It’s not a sufficient condition, but more and more it’s becoming a necessary one.