Imagine that the Seasteading Institute asked you to design the first floating city in the Pacific Ocean. Would you copy Boston’s labyrinth of streets? Would you duplicate New York’s system of collecting trash bags from sidewalks?

No, you would not. What about power — would you build a coal-fired plant and traditional electrical grid? No. Would you spend millions of dollars on wiring to recreate existing homes or office buildings? No.

The floating city would skip the power infrastructure we take for granted. Why shouldn’t developing communities leapfrog that infrastructure as well?

Today, more than one billion people live without access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The model for rural electrification is shifting rapidly from gridded to “gridless.” It should also switch from wired to wireless.

Developing communities leapfrogged landlines for cell towers, and many will skip fossil fuels for renewables. If cost, practicality and power-sharing are priorities in rural electrification, leapfrogging to wireless power is the best choice. We can think about this process in several stages:

1. Create A ‘Gridless’ Power Infrastructure

Energy poverty is concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, India and developing Asia, where communities are isolated from urban infrastructure. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals call for “universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services” by 2030. The development plans need to focus on non-grid or mini-grid power if they hope to reach that goal.

Remote off-grid areas tend to build infrastructure from scratch because they’re too far from conventional grids, and they have far less funding per person than a VC-backed floating utopia. The IEA’s Energy Access Outlook 2017 report estimates that universal power by 2030 will require an annual investment of $52 billion per year. Less than half that amount is currently mobilized.