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There are so many problems with simplifying power usage and production, there is no silver bullet. The costs are always based on todays markets. I think coal s

There are so many problems with simplifying power usage and production, there is no silver bullet. The costs are always based on todays markets. I think coal should be relegated to a baseline emergency power role, there are several problems with that statement depending on where you are in the world and what role coal has there.

phil21 2y ago
Who is paying to build, maintain, and operationally staff a coal plant fired up a few times a year? Or the infrastructure to mine said coal when needed on such an intermittent basis? This is where the cost calculations of solar fall apart to the point of being outright fraud. You need to add the cost of the natural gas peaker plant you build and keep around for nights and “seasonal” energy troughs before the number makes any sort of sense whatsoever. I’ve said it before - but solar power has been the easiest ever to predict investment I’ve ever made so far in life. The investment was into natural gas. Solar is cheap until you reach a saturation point that is already there in some areas - rapidly approaching in others. Battery deployments currently are measured in the hours of duck curve they cover at the moment, not nights or number of days they can cover in totally predictable seasonal energy shortage scenarios. It’s trivial when you can ignore and socialize the actual expensive hard problems to solve. I love solar and wind - they should be primary generation sources for humanity. I hate the utterly rampant financial fraud going on sold to the public by professional grifters.