The old coal should have been replaced years ago, they were not because all the focus has been on wind and solar. The old generators were needed to keep costs low and maintain reliability whilst expensive wind & solar were introduced and tested. Our emissions are higher today than they needed to be.
Those Wind & Solar generators are now embedded in the network and have much higher costs that the new ones. The issue has always and will always be about the mix of generation, rate of transformation and despatchable power - articles like this do nothing to address that issue.
I think the renewable industry has a small opportunity to start being honest with the public about the limitations and true cost of Wind and Solar. As more and more are installed the problems will increase and that is foreseeable. The current modelling is flawed and debate stiffled on all sides by bias and self interest.
From the report:
In this analysis, wind and solar replace all coal-fired generation solely on an annual basis, but as previously stated, a limitation of this analysis is that replacing annual generation does not capture coal generation dispatch timing. Despite its notorious inflexibility, coal is mostly dispatchable, while wind and solar are variable sources of energy whose output, even in aggregate, does not necessarily match demand.
Also The next refuge for those with an economic stake in coal generation is reliability, or claims that the grid cannot run reliably without it. This report cannot directly address that contention,
