tl;dr Connecting new power generation to the electricity grid is a queue-based permit system that is stupid and slow, but simple and supremely stable. There is a decent chunk of renewable power “in the queue” but speeding up the connection process risks damaging stability.
The article notes India’s electrification as a partial counter-example: relatively fast, but correspondingly relatively unstable. (One marker mentioned was “kerosene liters consumed”, as a proxy for how much lighting has been replaced by electricity, they note the amount dropped from 9 billion liters to 2 billion liters, which I take as a very rough indicator of ~80% grid reliability - not even one “9“ of stability. It’s hard to find representative data on developed-world power grid reliability but for instance there is a common estimate that the average Australian resident experiences 200 minutes of power outage per year, which corresponds to somewhere above three-and-a-half 9s and below four 9s. This suggests potentially quite an extreme cost in stability for the moderate benefit of speeding up queue times for renewable power.)
The article notes India’s electrification as a partial counter-example: relatively fast, but correspondingly relatively unstable. (One marker mentioned was “kerosene liters consumed”, as a proxy for how much lighting has been replaced by electricity, they note the amount dropped from 9 billion liters to 2 billion liters, which I take as a very rough indicator of ~80% grid reliability - not even one “9“ of stability. It’s hard to find representative data on developed-world power grid reliability but for instance there is a common estimate that the average Australian resident experiences 200 minutes of power outage per year, which corresponds to somewhere above three-and-a-half 9s and below four 9s. This suggests potentially quite an extreme cost in stability for the moderate benefit of speeding up queue times for renewable power.)