It's not the energy to run a cell phone. It's the embodied energy of a cell phone and solar panel. It's the 20 kilo bags of grain which come off the boat in Egypt from Alberta. It's the cell towers, it's the bulk shipper which brings the grain, it's the container which transports the cell phones and panels.
A world in which anyone at all is flying around the world in dozens of passenger jets several times just in the course of living has an enormous amount of available energy relative to any time in history. If this is scarce, we don't have a word for what it was like before.
This is a terrible bar. By even being on an airplane just once you are already in the top 20% of the world. If you’ve done several circumnavigations you’re outside of the category of flying once or twice for major life events which puts you in the top 1%.
> Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy
This is a really uninformed view of the energy requirements to sustain human life. Transportation, getting people food/water, and HVAC dominates this. Enough energy to run a cell phone is a joke.