* Nuclear for base load generation
* Wind/Solar for peak times during the day
* Pumped hydroelectric storage to help offset excess capacity
* Maintain existing hydroelectric dams
It's pretty much that simple, but the politic blocks against using nuclear are massively damaging to our ability to put in place any real solutions.
Do we!? What happens otherwise? Because it's a cast iron certainty that global emissions won't be anywhere near 50% less in ten years time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365817
Also dams kill fish, to the point of driving salmon nearly to extinction in the pacific northwest:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/on-the-northwests-snake-river...
Aside from that, I think that your sentiment is correct that we have the technology today to get off fossil fuels.
The trend is that electricity will soon become too cheap to meter (literally, at peak production more energy will flow into the grid than what's used). So the new frontier in renewable energy is storage.
If I had a million dollars, I'd invest in displacement tech like this one:
http://www.summitt.ca/canada-launches-worlds-first-underwate...
There's also great promise in storing excess grid energy in electric car batteries, and in big dumb sodium-sulfur or nickel-iron batteries.
So I think we should put our R&D efforts into energy storage, not nuclear. Not to mention that nuclear is now the most expensive technology. It goes nuclear, coal, natural gas, solar, then wind in descending order:
https://bfnagy.com/clean-electricity/usa-solar-wind-are-less...