The issue is if you suddenly cut back oil countries pivot to bringing coal back because it's the fastest to scale up.
That may have been true a couple of decades ago, but as of 2023[1] it was significantly cheaper to build new solar than to continue operating existing coal plants. And building new coal plants takes 5 years.
The issue is that in a lot of places, it's not about building new coal plants. It's refurbishing and restarting old plants that have been shut down in the past decade or two.
Coal is already here but most places worked really hard to move to cleaner sources (oil being one of them) and wind down the existing coal infra.
This is part of the reason why people have been pushing nuclear SMRs (small modular reactors) given they can often be set up in existing coal plants and they just replace the coal part of the plant and reuse the existing turbines, etc since just like coal nuclear is basically a glorified steam boiler.
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That may have been true a couple of decades ago, but as of 2023[1] it was significantly cheaper to build new solar than to continue operating existing coal plants. And building new coal plants takes 5 years.
1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/01/30/building-new-solar-pr...
The issue is that in a lot of places, it's not about building new coal plants. It's refurbishing and restarting old plants that have been shut down in the past decade or two.
Coal is already here but most places worked really hard to move to cleaner sources (oil being one of them) and wind down the existing coal infra.
This is part of the reason why people have been pushing nuclear SMRs (small modular reactors) given they can often be set up in existing coal plants and they just replace the coal part of the plant and reuse the existing turbines, etc since just like coal nuclear is basically a glorified steam boiler.
It’s not that useful if you don’t have enough storage.
And in more northern latitude you’ll still need to turn those plants back on since just won’t at all for at least a couple of months in winter.