It doesn’t. Coal’s sinking like a lead balloon because it’s too expensive. It is far cheaper to build ridiculous overcapacity of wind and solar, with moderate storage, than to pursue other energy sources, like nuclear or coal.
Live by the market, die by the market.
Of course, nobody is willing to have conversations about just using radically less energy. Can't have that...
Coal plants, mind you, aren’t a good solution to the issue of active spikes demand, they take significant time to ramp up and down and have minimum loads they have to put out, it’s prohibitively expensive to turn them of and on.
EVs can, and likely will play a key role in demand management, that’s a good thing.
An absolute full of shit take. If that was the case, we would see conservatives pushing for more solar and wind to help cut the cost and reliance on foreign nations, no?
>I know quite a few pretty hard conservatives with solar
Those are some cool anecdotes, but generally speaking solar power has much less to do with the current overton window than literally everything else on the republican "platform".
It sounds more like you just know a bunch of weed-republicans who vote against their own self-interest, not that you know the republican voter base.
The conservative end of the spectrum is generally more concerned with things like "a stable power grid with enough power at all times" than carbon emissions, though I know quite a few pretty hard conservatives with solar, hybrids, EVs, etc. And a good case can be made for all that stuff without bothering with carbon emissions at all.
And then you see things like California, within a week or so, deciding to ban ICE car sales in some fairly near future, and having to send out power announcements about "Please don't charge your EV during these hours." It doesn't take a genius to do the math that, hey, more EVs charging while coal power plants are turned down, that might be a problem. I think it's a solvable one, but "shouting down anyone who points it down as a fossil fuel shill" (as happens in some circles of the internet - not here, but I've certainly been accused it for some nuanced arguments about power systems) doesn't help solve it.
If coal with carbon capture has a future in the power grid... so be it.