[vineyardmike]

Well the article links to a source of the unreliable claim. You read the article right?

The coal is unreliable narrative has existed for many years because coal plants break down and have mechanical issues at higher rates than other sources, renewable and otherwise. Coal is less reliable than natural gas and oil based power, nuclear, to say nothing of the comparison to solar, which obviously doesn’t need mechanical repairs. The method of converting coal to power is actually less reliable because it’s more mechanically intense, and has more moving parts which makes it more fragile and repair prone.

If you google this, you’ll find that statistically across coal plants, they’ve historically had a reliability of 70-90% of target capacity due to mechanical issues.