"They" are doing it! Remarkably, more than half of new energy generation deployed in the United States this year has been from solar. It's arguably the most shovel-ready form of energy infrastructure that exists right now.

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.

> If solar really was cheaper as a baseline power supply, what it needs to be to replace fossil fuels, they'd be doing it.

So, you haven't looked at what energy companies are doing for the last 3 years...

Sure. Building out renewables while still keeping their coal/methane plants running. Then again, with the abundance of rooftop solar where it's economical, there's really no need for utility level solar. Wind is good still but also inconsistent.

With the way power demand is growing, new fossil plants aren't being built really because renewables can pick up a lot of the new demand but solar is at the point in some places where utilities don't want your excess power.

Renewables are great in the places they fit but they don't fit everywhere.

> while still keeping their coal/methane plants running

Methane, yes. The coal plants are being slowly shut down, as they are too expensive to run even after they were paid for.

You also seem to ignore the huge amount of utility-level PV farms and generation-side storage built recently. You are technically correct in that renewables don't fit everywhere, but that's again a common propaganda phrase because they fit the places where almost everybody lives, and long distance transmission already solves the problem for most people outside of that area.

Exactly. It's also just bizarre to attempt to make the whole conversation about special one-off cases where some regions already have so much solar power that they won't benefit from adding more when such cases are not representative of the global picture, which is that there's abundant need going forward and abundant capability to build it out going forward.

So why focus on the unrepresentative cases, unless the intent is to be misleading? There'd better be a very good insight at the end of this road that's worth price of "accidentally" of invoking unrepresentative examples, and it better be something a hell of a lot more substantive than going "gosh renewables, gee, I don't know. Denmark sure has a lot of renewables already, don't forget about that! " It's the "You Forgot Poland" of energy debates.

>while still keeping their coal/methane plants running

At lower capacity because their generation is being actively offset by renewables.