So crossover happened, solar/coal. Now what?

[iceaura]

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-2017/

As LCOE values for alternative energy technologies continue to decline, in some scenarios the full-lifecycle costs of building and operating renewables-based projects have dropped below the operating costs alone of conventional generation technologies such as coal or nuclear. - -

The question highlights an increasingly obvious aspect of the situation: it's never been about large scale economics, really. If it had been, there would be no operating nukes in the US outside of the military, for starters.

It's always been a political matter - how do we want to live?

 

[parmalee]

Remember this?

“And it’s going to take fossil fuels to push power out into those villages in Africa, where a young girl told me to my face: ‘One of the reasons that electricity is so important to me is not only because I’m not going to have to try and read by the light of a fire and have those fumes literally killing people.’”

(Rick Perry) continued: “But also from the standpoint of sexual assault. When the lights are on, when you have light that shines the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/02/rick-perry-fossil-fuels-sexual-assault

Fossil fuels to power a freaking light?! One would think that the dishonesty, the opportunism, and the blatant greed here would be apparent to anyone with a high school diploma, but apparently, in an age where more than half the populace are cyborgs (i.e., wholly incapacitated without their smart phones), thought and reflection is too much to ask.

 

[sculptor]

When I was a little boy, my uncle Nick had a small coal mine that he worked with his 2 sons Jean and Jerry and a mule.
After I promised to stay on the back of the mule, they let me go down in the mine with them, Really nice mule, if I slid to the side, he.she.it(?) would adjust his/her/it's back to keep me centered. the mule would walk from the face to the shaft, then back again---------always light at the end of a long black tunnel---sunlight at the shaft, and their carbide lamps at the face.
Some of my happiest hours were on the back of that mule.

meanwhile
I do not like strip mining and mountain top removal really sux.
So then, fucking up nature for export $ then also sux.

Mining pay is above average, but Nick died of the black lung within a couple months of retirement,