Who's we? This sounds like another one of those silly "why do x when we could imagine doing something completely different" type of arguments for nothing and posited for no reason.

"Don't build skyscrapers, build townhouses!" "Don't have checkstops, people die in car accidents anyway, instead we need to think about road safety" "Why build a huge energy project when small towns won't directly benefit in the next 5 years"

You would assume that the considerations have been made because it's basically a massive engineering project, it hasn't been posted to hacker news for the purpose of gathering theoretical conjecture in step 1 of the planning process, and that's how massive engineering projects tend to work, along with other political effects that aren't necessarily logical reasoning experiments to begin with.

Financially I assume the analysis was done by the people committing $22bn. Presumably the investment in the region will both spur local development (jobs and infrastructure) as well as other forms of development. The thing about solar is that people tend to overbuild it, since you need to ensure that there’s sufficient capacity even when it’s cloudy or the sun is low in the sky, so power near the generation sources should be relatively inexpensive when the sun is shining (and if more is needed, scaling existing solar plants will be much cheaper than building new infrastructure.) And then of course there’s the very real benefit that decarbonizing Europe will have on the undeveloped world, which is going to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change.

It strikes me that developing a more renewable grid that decarbonizes energy in both Europe and Africa is one option. There's no reason the electricity can only go from Africa to the UK. It might well flow in reverse on windy nights.

The other is that rich and middle class people in the developed world build their own little microgrids that can easily withstand primary grid outages with all the economic inefficiency that entails. Batteries are relatively scarce still and are far more equitably deployed to the grid writ large than only certain households.

But of course perfect is the enemy of good which is why people are arguing about this online.

> What kinds of benefits would we see in the near future if we invested in providing power to places that could use it for development and not merely consumption

Sounds like you are asking "don't spend 22 billion on infrastructure for yourself, donate 22 billion to build infra for someone else"

Not so simply, no. But if we can pivot to a philosophy of lifting up the lowest among us, rather than exploiting their resources to extract value from them, that would be a positive step for humanity.