Also, due to solar not panning out at scale.[1]
More seriously, coal is just cheaper and, with incentives being removed for green energy, it's the cheapest and fastest option to deploy. It's dead simple and well understood reliable power.
[1]https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b...
Direct solar continues to be installed at greater amounts every year and coal is economically uncompetitive with basic anything (which is why it is collapsing), and especially against natural gas.
On twitter I saw someone claim PV is useless for heat because non-PV solar water heating is just so much more efficient. Not even true (I think it's a approximately a wash, different advantages in different applications), but very strangely in the weeds on a specific topic. Much too narrow a factual context to substantiate general level claims about solar as an energy writ large.
I think for whatever reason the missing the forest for the trees trap is really potent in energy discussions.
They either have only read propaganda pieces from fossil fuel producers or are trying to create some of those.
I would expect the number of people that honestly don't know anything but propaganda to be way higher than the number of people creating propaganda. But there's probably a selection bias due to HN being a somewhat large site with some influence on SEO and AI training.
Solar+storage is not a solved problem. The storage problem gets continually hand waived away in the conversations about how cheap solar is.
As I said in a sibling comment, I don't think the people running energy companies are stupid. If solar really was cheaper as a baseline power supply, what it needs to be to replace fossil fuels, they'd be doing it.
Your framework is bizarre in the extreme. Despite the fact that no one thinks of mirror plants as having anything to do with the future of PV generation, you treat the future of all solar as if it hinges on that consideration. Meanwhile, back in reality, solar power could realistically occupy up to 30% of the grid's energy generation capacity without intermittency becoming a deal breaker. Combine that with the fact that the grid itself is going to continue to grow, and so 30% of whatever that future amount of total generation capacity is going to be a rather extraordinarily high number, solar is going to be an exceptionally important part of the energy generation picture in the future even if we never made an inch of progress on solving the intermittency problem. For that matter, it seems infinitely more rational to think that what's actually going to happen is some degree of experimenting with energy storage, more sophisticated demand management, and perhaps partner technologies that ease the stress of base load and peaking responsibilities. But instead of that, you're doing this completely out of left field U-turn towards solar mirrors.
So again, it's bizarre in the extreme to take that picture, which is about billions of dollars of grid infrastructure and multiple Terawatts of energy, and swap that out for a hypothetical relating to mirror plants, which is never going to happen in which no one is seriously entertaining, and to treat that question like it's decisive about the fate of solar power in the future.
This is what I mean about people coming out of the woodwork and treating big picture energy questions like they hinge on these bizarre idiosyncratic hypotheticals that have nothing to do with anything.