Please note that your strength as a rationalist does not just include the ability to state your incredulity, but also to research things that are very easy to research (one minute of googling would have made these questions unnecessary).

Ten minute of googling did not give me coherent results or even the kind of data I was looking for.

The only "maintenance" figures I could find were combinations of the original plant construction and project costs flattened over 30 years added to the "operation and maintenance" costs, in $/mWh (which I believe carries about the same information as the figures in your link).

Unsurprisingly, these were higher than what the figure for "$ cost per short ton" of coal (of which at least 2 out of 4 figures I found clearly did not include the costs of transport) gives when converted to $/mWh using some reference assumptions about kWh/btu and btu/coal (these).

From the link you give me, Fixed O&M seems to be the base maintenance and operating costs (I assume including personnel), while the variable O&M figures seem to be that + fuel. Line maintenance seems to be included in the first one, unless I've read this wrong (or perhaps isn't even anywhere in these figures), so the difference between the two numbers looks like what's interesting. And that difference is clearly higher than the fixed maintenance cost for new generation technologies.

If these figures don't contain line maintenance, then I don't see at all what you're basing your argument on. Your initial wording in the grandparent seemed to imply that the cost of line maintenance per mWh was greater than the total cost of mining, processing and transporting the coal per mWh. This is the main point on which I was incredulous, because my priors tell me that operating a train that ferries hundreds of tons of coal regularly for thousands of miles will cost more than maintaining the distribution lines.

However, I'll admit that my priors may not have been adjusted to take into account the costs of maintaining every single neighborhood, every single street transformer, every single endpoint to every single home, along with all the crap that happens there and all the disaster repairs necessary each year. If this was included in your claim, then that changes my perspective quite a lot.

Note that the solar and wind power also have no fuel costs. Are you equally incredulous that solar and wind power cost substantially more than coal-thermal per watt?

I never doubted that the costs of starting a new plant were extremely high. I was unclear on this; as I hopefully clarified above, it's the "line maintenance" point that got me wide-eyed.

Cars are manufactured slower, redesigned more rarely (design generations last multiple years for each model), bought more rarely, and take much longer to pay off. The limiting factor (battery capability) has historically improved very slowly in spite of massive investment.

Valid points. I also agree with the remaining bits. I'll concede that the metric may not be as poor as I believed. My conception may have been affected by a relatively high different prior that new energy storage and transfer technologies will come up in the foreseeable future that would be much more practical for electric vehicles. However, that's a separate point from the LENR issue and bears no relevance here, so my mistake.