> BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage."

No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.

The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.

You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.

> Yeah, it's because of the above points.

Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?

Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.

Nah, it’s coz they were almost all built in an era before renewables became cheaper than coal in the last few years.