> civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
Article says they're using coal to power the data centres. I've not yet heard of anyone going with coal for ideological reasons. Maybe we've entered an exciting new age for that, but the solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio so I'm going to go with coal being the better option here.
It is cheaper in this case because it's not a comparison of new solar versus new coal.
They're spinning back up dirty old coal plants that they previously shut down because alternatives were cheaper/better. This means the upfront cost is lower for the power company but the long term costs to the environment and health of the public are compromised to allow them to put off building new infrastructure that would provide cleaner AND cheaper power in the long term.
They're socializing the costs and privatizing the profits again.
> solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio
Are you sure that's the case and it's not that you are being lied to by the Republicans who take huge donations from the energy sector? Can you cite a study that isnt more than a decade old and hasn't been retracted?
There have been numerous studies to the contrary and having priced home solar myself recently I can tell you firsthand that costs have only gone down significantly every single year for the last decade. The cost for new solar has never been lower and for new construction it's been beating coal for at least years already. Coal is expensive, despite what the coal industry tells you.
If you read the linked article you'll note that even new solar and existing coal are competitive, despite it being an unfair comparison. If you add in storage costs it can leave renewables at a slight disadvantage, but in exchange people get to have healthy lungs and land that hasn't been permanently rendered unusable by strip mining and toxic runoff.
It baffles me that Republicans would rather keep power costs high AND making the environment worse than use the free and inexhaustible power the sun provides. Hell, it's red states that would benefit the most from upgrading the grid. I saw one estimate that installing solar would generate nearly a trillion dollars in jobs for red states over the next decade.
Solar is cheaper now. Has been for awhile.