Maybe there's a story element here that's been overlooked. You're a future civilisation, come to colonise an alien world. You're not simming the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, you'd create the efficient technology as soon as you could.

Another note, most of the early game is still coal, as the ...

I was thinking something similar, but about about the logic applications if they sent a 0/1 state to the network. Their inbuilt dusk/dawn sensor would be a far more reliable method of implementing parallel power architecture (solar/steam). So the condition would read (not actual code), "If ...