[DonsDiscountGas]

Nobody, anywhere, is building new coal power plants. Approximately all new power is wind and solar. Which is good. But there is still a lot of installed capacity. And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.

[zahlman]

> And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.

Why wouldn't "existing solar is cheaper than existing coal, and existing coal is not required to meet demand" result in coal plants shutting down?

[miahi]

You need a lot of batteries to store the energy needed overnight and you have to plan for (lots of) days without sun. At my latitude (45N) the difference in solar production between summer and winter is 5x. Even with batteries, you still need a backup for a week of bad weather; so you have to choose between increasing the solar production 20x to have enough power generated in cloudy days or have a backup coal/gas/something else plant.

[citrin_ru]

In regions where winters are dark windy places tent to be not too far away. If both solar and wind both overbuild to the extent it makes sense (say 5x for solar and 2x for wind) and batteries cover a normal daily cycle you probably will need to burn gas on 10-20% of days which is not net zero but way way better than the current situation.

[DonsDiscountGas]

Demand for electricity is growing massively. Existing coal is required to meet demand.

[ApolloFortyNine]

China is. [1]

I don't get why people feel the need to just start lying when talking about renewables. It's probably a large reason why people are always skeptical of 'rewnewables are cheaper than x' claims.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...

[epistasis]

They're building them, but not using them.

They get built because their market has messed up pricing for providing generation capacity, far in excess of the need for capacity. So the coal plants get built, and not used much.

In particular, they are replacing coal plants meant for baseload with newer and far more efficient coal plants meant for more intermittent use, but that amount of use will go down drastically in coming years as cheaper batteries and renewables flood the grid.

There's also a smattering of coal plants being built elsewhere in the world, but that's usually due to corruption in the process of regulatory approval. It's far easier to hide bribes in large coal plants than it is in tons of small renewables projects.

Edit: and I just realized that I was only talking about developing countries with those corruption accusations; I'd heard of many such instances in places such as Africa and India. But now I guess I must add the US to the list. We don't know what payments are going on behind the scenes because of Trump's cryptocurrency, but undoubtedly that's a big part of these new coal generators too.

[ApolloFortyNine]

You don't think maybe there's a need for a base capacity that isn't dependent on whims of weather?

You think it's more likely that China is sitting on totally unused generators?

I'm not sure what this is.

[epistasis]

> You think it's more likely that China is sitting on totally unused generators?

It's not "think" it's "data" that's been in the news a lot this year, after being projected for many years:

https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/chinas-coal-fired-pow...

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...

[f33d5173]

China is.

[dalyons]

and yet their coal usage has declined in the last two years, and is projected to continue declining.