We're burning coal - which burns really hot. Nobody has managed to come up with a more economically efficient approach than burning that coal kilometers away fr

We're burning coal - which burns really hot. Nobody has managed to come up with a more economically efficient approach than burning that coal kilometers away from the place that needs to be heated. And not for clever chemical reactions, we're still burning it for heat. So it turns out that the most effective way to heat a space is to burn coal for heat but jam a ridiculous amount of stuff between that and the eventual heated space. Obviously you've got all the details, but if those details are what turned out to be true for coal then we as the public have no idea at all what the details are going to be for solar. Possibly even the insiders don't know yet. There is a pretty good chance here that centralised solar installations win the economic battle.