Established supply chain, workforce knowledge. Energy density. Ease of use.

Most if not all power used is generated almost instantly as needed. So when you look at solar (which is a great renewable) you run into the fact that it only generates power while the sun is out, and a specific amount of power.

This causes the problem of, how do you generate power at night and what do you do on rainy days or if a cloud covers the panels. You can substitute this with other renewable energy sources: wind, hydro, and nuclear, but wind has similar issues as solar and hydro and nuclear have huge upfront costs and take years to build.

So this is where coal and natural gas come in. Coal has the downside of being really bad for the environment but can start up within 10ish minutes of being needed. Gas is better for emissions (not great), but takes more time to startup.

A lot of companies use a mix of things along with buying and selling power with other companies (similar to a stock market). There are thoughts of trying to store power or looking at small scale nuclear plants.

Solar chart through the day:

Power use throughout the day:

Source: I work for a large power company

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Swapping entirely to renewable energy is cool and all but not as easy as “just use a bunch of solar panels???” The issue is that most renewables are some mix of a: unreliable, and b: geographical.

Wind isn’t going to be blowing 24/7 in most places, so wind is unreliable. The sun isn’t always shining in most places, so solar power is unreliable. Hydro is amazing if you have it, but it isn’t the kind of thing you can just build anywhere. Geothermal is also great if you have it, but again isn’t the kind of thing you can just build.

Meanwhile, the power grid requires reliability. It’s incredibly important. The obvious kneejerk response is “but batteries?” which would work and all but you’re basically suggesting we produce enough power during the day to cover usage overnight, which is a tall order. There’s also the fact that the kind of battery banks we’re talking about would be ruinously expensive, and probably some amount of dangerous.

Also, like other people have said: coal/gas are cheap and ubiquitous. Both of those words might as well be synonyms for ‘more money’. Realistically, that’s the primary reason.

Despite the replies, the real answer is that it’s not as simple as “stopping drilling”.

The fossil fuel industry isn’t just oil and fuel…it’s quite literally everything.

• The vulkanized rubber in the tires of your electric vehicle…yep…petroleum based.

• The hard plastic that forms the interior panels, and the side walls, the steering wheel and literally everything else made of plastic on the planet? You guessed it…petroleum based.

• The lubricants that keep the chains chaining, the gears gearing, the whirligigs whirling and the moving parts moving…once again…petroleum based.

• Much of the cosmetics industry, as well as chapsticks, lotions, sunscreens, etc… Yep…all have at least some petroleum based ingredients.

• The calking and rubber cement that keeps the tiles your walking on stuck to the floor…yep…you guessed it.

Are you starting to get it?

Hippies can complain all they want, and I ABSOLUTELY agree that we need to be moving away from the petroleum industry faster. But it’s not a matter of switching to electric cars because EVERY part of modern life is from the roads we drive on to the keyboard I’m typing this one, is in some way or another making use of a petroleum based product.

We have a long hard road before that’s not the case anymore.

Money mostly. It generates a lot of profit and it costs money to switch. In many of countries oil, gas, etc. are like a huge portion of their GDP. It’s like trying to get people to eat less meat. It would be better and more environmentally friendly, but everyone is too dependent on meat.

Money, They cornered the market and then they started yielding the profits from it to exert political influence. That’s why molten Salt Thorium Reactors were abandoned by american scientists in the 60s. With nuclear power it would mean the end of for profit energy consumption. That plus the surveillance network of the billionaire class is what’s fueling all of the political tensions and far-right (See Fascism) around the world. Denmark is already capable of producing over 140% of its daily energy usage through wind alone. The guardian wrote an article about it in 2015. Wind is still less than 1% of all global energy production. Alberta gets 300 days of sun a year, but have been brainwashed by big oil to invent and reflexively disavow any information otherwise. Then the fossil fuel industry and tech industry launched the Brexit disinformation campaign to weaken the EU that same year. With the advent of China as well as Copenhagen Atomics producing working prototype reactors capable of producing staggeringly vast amounts of energy with less than 1000x the nuclear waste of traditional light water reactors, the change is inevitable. That’s what all of this is for them the war in Ukraine, Trump, Italy, Romania. It’s the fossil fuel industry. With the advent of nuclear power, the obviousness of the effects of climate change and advanced battery technology, the only way they can ensure a continuous demand is war. There are no electric tanks. Russia is a petro state, Saudi Arabia is a petro state, trump is trying to turn the US into an authoritarian petro state. It’s oil, they are the reason for all of this bullshit. Coal power plants are the most dangerous form of energy production, they kill approximately 1,000,000 people a year. We’ve had the technology to move away from them for over 70 years. That’s 70,000,000 dead people. That is more people than died in the entire second world war and we aren’t even talking about it because we’d rather just fall into arguing about transgenderism online than actually stopping them. It all goes back to fossil fuels.

Because a cabal of evil rich people are holding the human race hostage so they can extract money from everyone so they can rape children on private islands.

Geopolitics. Coal is available in tons of places and cheap to use and extract.

You’re trying to move something with the inertia of an entire planet’s economy, which represents an incredible, almost incomprehensible amount of effort. Inertia becomes an incredibly powerful force that inherently maintains the status quo when you’re talking about huge systems with vast complexity. Yes, there are real challenges (which can be overcome) and yes there is real opposition from entrenched interests who stand to profit (or lose) significantly, and yes there are governments who are myopic and moving far too slowly. But most people underestimate the size of the role that sheer inertia plays. Not even just in this situation, but in all sorts of different situations, especially when you’re talking about global issues or societal progress. Human minds and values cannot be changed with the snap of a finger. Individuals perhaps can, but as a civilization it often takes decades, or even centuries when the change is massive enough, even when technology itself moves much faster than that.

Even when the danger is clear, and the solution is obvious, and almost every government in the world agrees in a matter of weeks or months what approach they need to take (COVID-19), you can’t push directly through the inertia of society itself without consequences. Look how shocking the backlash was, and arguably that backlash is still occurring and potentially contributed significantly to serious things like the spread of measles and even the re-election of Trump.

At least here (germany) its lobbyism and stability
the only way that fossils can compete to “basically free energy after setup” is that there is a law or something that raises the prices of renewables to that of fossils so that fossils can compete
also coal gets taxmoney to make it cheaper

fossil energy plants also cant like be put on or off at any time. They often need a day on start or something so if one turns them off they are off for a while.
so they are used as a “baseline” while renewables can be put on or down depending on need (or run extra low to increase energy prices but psssss as they are not allowed to do so)

Also there are a lot of nation states that have little to no natural resources other than oil. So if there is ever a day that oil how’s bust. Those nations will be irrelevant and their whole economy and purchase power on imports goes back 200 years.

There was a quote that is sometimes attributed to Sheikh Rashid but most likely not a real quote but it speaks the truth about those petostates.

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel”

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planes need oil, as do ships.