Green Energy

Comparisons to coal are pretty... ehh.

Coal is dead technology. It just sucks. It's incredibly expensive and polluting. Outside of a few plainly-corrupt politicians (like a certain senator from West Virgina), no one is really standing up to defend coal. That's even true internationally. China's trying to export all theirs to places that have no regulation around things like flyash because only by completely externalizing those factors can it make any sense, and even then it's a huge stretch. Germany has a concrete plan to decommission all of theirs (which has way too long a timetable, but that's a separate discussion). Australia is starting to sort their shit out on the subject, too, though the politics around Aussie energy policy make wonk heads spin they're so all over the place.

There are regions in the US I know of where local utilities are buying out coal plants in order to shut them down and terminate their purchase agreements because it's cheaper than continuing to buy the coal power. That's how lousy a power source coal is. Within my lifetime, I suspect I'll see virtually all North American coal plants get sold off / decommissioned even absent the regulation we ought to be passing to shut them down immediately.

Solar is just cheap. It's cheap cheap cheap. The market is going to continue to make it explode. There are actual terrawats of solar wanting to come online with the transmission infrastructure (and FERC et al.'s broken policy regarding interconnection queues) being the main thing holding it back.

What we really need to see right now is more investment in wind. It's totally complementary to solar production -- the wind tends to be blowing when the sun isn't shining -- but wind has not experienced the same wild learning curves ~~wind~~ solar has. That's holding us back from having renewable grids and needs to change. If only backyard/rooftop wind were as easy to do as solar.