[brrt]

I am under no illusions about the need for power :-). In fact, I agree with just about everything in your post.

However, I would add: Coal plants use only a relatively small local surface area, but when you add the size of the coal mines, the infrastructure required to ship those tons of coal, the space required to store the tons coal ash produced each day (often contaminated with heavy metals; it's earth we're burning after all).... that becomes a very different discussion.

I'm unsure why people are so keen on geothermal, though. I thought it was relatively well-known that geothermal generates power in the order of milli-watts-per-square-meter, thus much smaller than solar (hundreds of watts per square meter), or even hydroelectric.