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Coal necessarily produces waste. It's an inviolable law of thermodynamics. Burning coal cannot produce enough energy to capture the waste products of burning coal.

Solar, on the other hand, can account for its own waste stream, even in energy terms, because the source of its energy comes from outside the system boundary.

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No, it's very much feasible to cool the CO2 down to ambient temperature and separate it from the nitrogen, in preparation for sequestering it.

Now, without setting a net-0 carbon dioxide emissions goal, which isn't feasible without salable atmospheric carbon dioxide capturing, there won't be enough incentives to capture the exhaust co2 from a coal power plant.

I'm no fan of coal, but to be fair "integrated gasification combined cycle" plants [1] are way cleaner than conventional coal plants without violating laws of thermodynamics. You can drastically reduce emissions of e.g. heavy metals, sulphur oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter, while being amenable to pre-combustion carbon capture.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_gasification_combin...

This is largely theoretical. The Kemper demo plant is a disaster in terms of massive cost overruns, many years of delays, and inconsequential net energy production. They ultimately abandoned the project.

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