I doubt renewables are cheaper once they start making up a majority of the supply (except in small countries that can get most electricity from hydropower). Sure batteries or other storage technology may get there eventually but that's very much TBD.
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Well, you're wrong to have that doubt.
80 or 85% is the figure that people usually quote as being when solar and wind will start having issues (the exact division between the two varies by latitude mostly), but at that point you're saving money on 85% of your energy expenditure so things have to go pretty drastically wrong for you to end up in the negative.
As this post notes, with cheap power you can make liquid fuels for less than it costs to dig them up.
This web site here will give you example renewable only grids for most of the earth and how much battery and power2x renewable gas you'd need. It's generally not a lot, wind and solar do the heavy lifting.
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
You get lots of batteries in sunny places, but that's just because it's cheap and we know it works well with solar. But yes anywhere with hydro gets to take advantage of cheap renewables much more easily.
Interesting. I'll have to look into it more closely. Sounds like the "climate crisis" (don't like that term but everyone knows what it means so it's convenient) is basically solved if everything you've said is true.
Yeah, it's always been a political problem, not an engineering one.
If you're effectively getting paid to release carbon into the atmosphere, then you're going to release a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. You're also going to get really pissed if someone wants to start charging you for it rather than paying you.
Luckily there were enough people who pushed for renewable subsidies to get them over the hump where even supervillains would use them for their own selfish profit.
Still to be seen whether we left it too late, how long disinformation and lies will hold us back still and so on, and whether any petro-states will start a big war to distract from the new reality but I'm generally positive (or as positive as you can be when you realise some of the largest corporations in the world and their pet politicians were literally gambling the future of the human race just so they'd get a fat bonus while making everyone else sicker and poorer, again).