A coal-burning plant might be bad for the environment, it might be bad for the miners who struggle underground to bring that coal up and bad for the West Virginia mountains razed in its production, but it’s a remarkably good fit for the grid. And not just coal. The grid is at its best when we make electricity using what are called “stock resources.” These are fuels that when we use them, we use them up—plutonium, natural gas, oil, coal, and anything else dug up from the ground or grown upon the earth that we burn and then have no more.
