Hmmm, so I work in the distributed energy resources sector, and I disagree that people in this space aren't recognizing how hard it will be to deeply decarbonize using intermittent generation. You're completely correct that as we add more and more intermittent generation to the grid, keeping the grid always online becomes crazy difficult.
However, everyone I know in the space looks at that challenge as opportunity rather than discouragement. It's not like we're going to hit high penetrations of intermittent renewables overnight. It's going to be a gradual ramp over years that allows us to also deploy complimentary systems to deal with the ever increasing intermittency. Piece-by-piece we will deploy flexibility technologies (DR, DERMS, storage, etc.) and move to new regulatory incentives and utility business models (performance-based ratemaking, etc.) that allow us to reach our 100% goals.
There's a ton of super smart people already working on the intermittency problem, and entire businesses are being built to solve it (disclosure: many of them use our platform). So I guess while I agree with your assessment of the level of difficulty, I don't agree with your level of despair. There's way too many smart engineers working in the space now for intermittency to be in impossible problem to solve.