Consider me ignorant in this topic, but doesn't coal throughput beat out Solar or Wind? As far as I know you can always burn coal where as wind and solar are limited by external factors.
Solar is particularly good at addressing daily peaks because those peaks generally happen during the day. Wind is good at relatively steady production around the clock because there is almost always wind blowing somewhere.
Coal is pretty terrible because it takes hours to react to changes in demand. This is why we have the term “baseload”: the rest of the industry must be highly dispachable to work around the high thermal mass (and resultant low responsiveness) of coal plants.
In addition coal plant tends to be large monolithic production, so the loss of one plant represents a significant proportion of supply. Coal is thus a net hazard to power reliability.
Of course, gas plants can also function continuously, and for baseline, nothing beats nuclear. But burning gas for energy is far better than just releasing it unburned in to the air, or flaring it for no productive purpose.
As we get more large-scale batteries online, the variable output of things like wind and solar will matter less, and they will be able to provide an ever-increasing percentage of our energy mix. This is well underway, but it is a huge task that will take a long time to complete.
https://thinkprogress.org/colorado-wind-batteries-cheap-12e8...