Good riddance to the Navajo plant. While it may have been providing some decent wage jobs on the reservation, it was otherwise despoiling the environment around a remarkable corner of the world.[0]
So was it really worth killing even more of our careers?
Bet the earth "as a whole" is better now that Chinese coal and hydro plants are supplying the power to build our shiny new cheap solar panels.
It takes conservatively 4 years for a panel to generate as much energy as it took to manufacture. It takes even more for that container ship to move them here. They're supposed to last 20 years, but really can be as poor as 15 and they loose efficiency each year. So 1/3 to 1/2 of their lifetime is just plain wasted already which means the stated efficiency and economics are grossly overestimated.
So yeah, I wouldn't build more coal plants either. Natural gas is like 1/3 the price of either solar or coal. But to applaud destroying existing infrastructure? And to shore that up with propaganda like "blight the landscape". That is naive and won't do anything to fix the basic problem.
If we choose to be wasteful materialistic energy hogs, then we have to pay for it. So give up your house AC and your car and everything else that uses so much electricity first - then play that moral high road card. The problem isn't the supply source or even the choice of raw material. It's wanton greed and wastefulness of the consumers.
No they won't because china doesn't give a crap about the environment. If coal or hydro or whatever is cheaper they will use it first.