The partisan obsession with coal is cultural, not practical. West Virginia coal miners are a convenient proxy for the image of hardworking Americans being oppressed by unnecessary and burdensome regulation (as if regulation was the source of the woes of the coal industry).

In practice, the entire coal mining industry employs fewer people than Arby's (true fact). Expensive changes to environmental regulations, environmental costs aside, will help very few people in that industry. Coal is gonna go the way of buggy whips, and and politicians will still do the moral equivalent of demanding we ban cars because they frighten the horses.

The real trick is going to be reworking the grid to take advantage of the intermittent nature of wind and solar. And the Invisible Hand has opinions about that. If you can cache enough power to stabilize the grid, then the whole "baseline" model currently provided by coal and nuclear plants running at near-capacity goes away.

And storing power isn't exactly rocket surgery. There are a whole lot of ways to do it - batteries, compression, gravity, thermal, etc. Add in smart micrometering (which also isn't exactly rocket surgery), and you create an arbitrage opportunity. Buy energy when it's cheap (when the wind blows and the sun shines), and sell it when it's dear (the demand is up and the sun is down). The invisible hand smooths out the ripples for us. The difference is power prices metered by the second or the minute, not the year. Market forces will regulate the prices, not actual regulation.

And because this combination cache baseline and zero-margin generation is so efficient, it'll quickly displace fossil and nuclear financially.

We just need to survive another couple of decades.