According to Energy Information Administration data, coal contributed just 8 megawatt-hours in January and February, an amount of energy the solar panels on my house can produce in roughly eight months.

From Jan1 to Dec 31 2025, my home solar panels generated 19.5MWh. That’s well over double what that coal plant produced in two months, and I produced far less CO2 doing it.

That’s… Not very impressive? Don’t get me wrong, renewables are just better and coal is even worse than other forms of generation, but that number is nothing to brag about. It’s like saying i did 15 push ups last year in response to the person who did their first set of 10 or whatever for the day.

Just to cut this off right here: you people are incredibly stupid. In this comment I’ve pointed out that coal is the worst form of power generation that we have (that i know of, anyway), just that it’s pointless to compare your solar panels to an inactive power plant. No where did i even imply any of this was good.

Buddy he’s comparing his rooftop solar to a dang power plant. In your analogy he’s saying “I did 15 pushups myself” to a football team that just managed 10. Dude has enough solar he’s probably selling back to the grid if they allow it, let me inform you that it is in fact kinda impressive

Comparing an entire year of what you generate to what a plant that isn’t even actually online can generate in 2 months is beyond pointless, especially when they didn’t even get very much more then the coal plant.

I literally cannot bend my brain in a way that makes what you said make sense.

Using simple math, we can divide the 12-month total by 6 to find out that this guy’s house produces almost half as much electricity as an entire coal-fired power plant, all without having to buy and burn any non-renewable fuels.

No it doesn’t. The plant isn’t producing energy right now. It’s only doing the bare minimum to make it viable to start actual production later (which it probably won’t do btw). And I’ve specifically said coal was worse than even other nonrenewable forms of energy production.