The planet that the colonists inhabit has few woody plants, and most of them are ill suited for charcoal burning (though fine for routine carpentry). It also never had any planetary events that produced deposits of coal or oil. As a result, the colonists can neither extract fuel from the ground nor reliably burn charcoal from wood in sufficient quantities to fuel any advanced smelting processes.
The planet itself has plenty of metal deposits, and the atmosphere of the planet is comfortably similar to Earth's since other photosynthetic lifeforms make up for the missing trees.
Without charcoal or coal, the colonists' metallurgy is limited to hammering soft metals that can be found in their native form, like copper, silver, gold, tin, and lead. They can burn small quantities of wood, straw, and other plants to induce metallurgical roasting, but they aren't be able to extract iron from ore, smelt alloys like bronze, or forge steel, though they might have small quantities of meteoric iron.
This lack of advanced metallurgy has a cascading effect, such that they cannot mass produce copper for wires, let alone effectively harness solar or nuclear energy.
The inhabitants instead harness wind and water energy for many major projects, including using water for hydraulic mining to retrieve soft metals like lead, gold, tin, and copper. Froth flotation is also used to increase their available supply of copper and lead.