• FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    The coal plants are normally not active, actually. They have a policy that when building renewable energy, they need to hedge it with some amount of active power generation that can be used to supplement the green energy in times of exceptional demand. Since the new plants are rarely used, it’s actually more eco-friendly than having to vastly overprovision solar panels or batteries for the 99.99% power requirement, when the 95% or 90% power requirement is a fraction of that (and the footprint of the coal plant used to stretch to the maximum power requirement is vastly smaller than equivalent solar power).

    It probably would still be better to use nuclear power as a hedge, not coal, but it’s not as economically viable to build a nuclear power plant that is rarely going to be active.