Have anarchist thinkers seriously thought of this?

The answer to that question is almost always that yes, they have. In this case I’d say start with reading The Dispossessed to get your imagination going before looking further into the topic at the anarchist library.

It’s notoriously difficult to get a feel for the scale of such things, but for one more data point: NYC apparently uses something like 50TWh of electricity in a year, so this “roughly the same area as New York City” facility could produce 12% of the power used by New York City.

Of course it would probably need to be larger if it were in New York rather than out in the middle of a presumably very sunny desert.

Managing populations is equally intractable. In many countries, calling for population planning would constitute political suicide. Even the United Nations Population Fund recently ‘decried any expressed concern about population growth as “alarmist”’ (O’Sullivan 2022b); strong advocates of population reduction strategies policies risk being vilified as racist, eco-fascists, eugenicists, anti-human or worse.

Hey look, I spotted the one part where it mentions anything having to do with eugenics.

Coal numbers I used were from S&P Global, and looked plausible enough for a rough estimate, in line with other stuff that turned up in a quick search. I should’ve said “approved” rather than “installed” in 2022, but that’s the kind of pace they’ve been going at for a while.

You’ll find lots of people predicting that total coal use in China will start to decline soon, of course. One of these days they’ll be right.

For those who prefer more sensible units that’s 800km² and an average output of 680MW.

China reportedly installed 86GW of new coal-fired power capacity in 2022 and their existing plants ran at a capacity factor ~50%, so this project is the equivalent of something like 1.6% of the coal-burning capacity they added in that year. But it’s also a pretty small fraction of all the solar panels they’re building.