For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal in the power market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are adding more solar there than anywhere else in the country. As a result of those diverging trajectories, the federal government expects ERCOT will receive 78 billion kilowatt-hours from solar in 2026, and just 60 from coal.
This trend does have seasonal variations. Last year, solar output beat coal on a monthly basis from March through August, and this year it is expected to do so from March through December, per the US Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy.
Natural gas can also use efficient modern turbines. Coal plants are a nonstarter in the modern era because they run so dirty with impurities that you have to use shitty turbines that are down for maintenance cleaning all the time.
Natural gas turbines can bypass the need to boil water and drive steam turbines, because the actual combustion of the gas creates the rotational energy directly.
Steam turbines are pretty great, though. Not sure how the rest of a coal plant operates, but the turbines themselves shouldn’t be touching any combustion byproduct.
I believe they also recover the heat to boil water to run steam turbines. Double the turbines.