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There was an old wine ad that makes a lot of sense for the developing nations. The revision should be "We will build no grid before its time". Taking the example from the wireless world of building a grid without a hard backbone may help power development immensely in the developing world. The example everyone holds up to the world is the US grid as to how an interconnected system leads to greater efficiency. But we forget that the grid was not the starting place for the US power system. The starting place was centralized power plants serving local load. The large urban areas developed in a disconnected manner. If you would, the US marketplace was based on distributed generation serving both power needs and – in such cases as Philadelphia – central steam heating needs. Distributed generation allows the transport of high energy density fuel – in those days frequently coal – to the power plant. The shift of generation out of the city core started to develop when the users could afford the higher cost – in the form of investment and power losses – of transmission in return for higher quality of life (moving the smoke plume and plant noise out of the city). In addition, one of the major benefits of a hard backbone grid is the ability to manage the covariance of the load between major load centers. This means that the grid allows one large plant to serve a greater load because the total system load is composed of non-coincident customer peaks (not everyone uses maximum load at the same time). As large manufacturing facilities developed electricity usage the potential savings began to appear. But this implies that the value of a grid comes from robust, highly developed load systems – not a fledgling energy marketplace. I have observed the political process of building transmission systems to “integrate” a region causing significant economic distress to a regional market. Look at the impact of the cost structure of the Central American transmission grid on the local power markets – the carrying cost of the facilities cannot be justified by the potential power flows on the grid. I propose a simple test for a transmission grid plan. Look at the total regional load. Assume that the load can save 10% of the needed capacity by taking advantage of the non-coincident nature of the energy usage. Value that “savings” at the expected cost of energy. Now look at the carrying cost of the transmission grid proposal – is it greater or less than the available “savings”. If not, then the transmission grid is “borrowing” from future savings to pay for potential utility in the future – not the best economic case. The test proposed above is merely a “rule of thumb” example. Load characteristics may create greater savings leverage. The wireless communication networks arose because the ability to serve load was cheaper without the large trunk wires – why shouldn’t electricity systems look at he same options. The one exception to this may be when external financiers are willing to build large generation facilities (read hydro, nuclear or coal generation) because they must be located in a certain place or because of NIMBY concerns. In that case, the recommendation is to use the “rule of thumb” to estimate the value to the host market and then negotiate to assure that all the rest of the costs fall to the external parties. In that manner the cost of the excess infrastructure won’t collapse the internal market development. A 500 MW national load is not going to generate the needed savings to justify the transmission grid. The US didn’t have a grid when its electricity market was that size. Why should anyone else think they have to?