Ok I'm going to explain the bit that no one wants to accept about those "shockingly cheap" wind/solar W's. Which the cheapest I think I've seen are only about 1/2 the cost of carbon based energy (which swings between NG and coal being the cheapest).
Lets talk solar because its initially easier to reason about:
So when you see $X per (K/W/G)watt compared to $Y per (K/W/G)watt for coal/ng/oil/nuke/etc your comparing what is basically the nameplate generational capacity of a renewable resource with the nameplate generational capacity of a reliable source. Then everyone gets happy and walks away.
But really lets say that you get 12H of solar production a day (which is a bit hand wavy because it won't ever produce peak power in the morning/evening).
So now on a given day your actually producing 12Wh of energy, but lets say for a moment you need 24Wh of energy evenly spread over the day. That same 1W NG plant can provide that. So to reach the 24Wh of reliable generation you need
2*SolarW
But because 1/2 of it is at night what you need is
1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge a 12Wh battery+1x battery*12
(which we are going to call a 1x battery from now on)
Now what happens if the sun fails to shine 1 day every two weeks?
Well now you need
1xSolar during the day+1x solar to charge for the night+1x battery+2x solar to charge the dark day+2x battery
1xSolar * 4+1xbattery * 3
And once every 3 months the sun doesn't shine for two days.
1xsolar*6+1xbattery*5
So, lets assume batteries cost 3x per 12Wh what 1W solar does and they last 1/2 as long (15 years say).
Now lets say the battery cost per unit solar is 6x.
So to just handle the case of two dark days in a row its:
6*x+(5*x*6)=36x the installed W price of solar.
But in reality lets say you want 3 9's generational reliability (which is probably still two more than you get with that 36x above) how much redundancy do you need? The answer in many places where its possible the sun doesn't shine for a week or more at a time is further multiples of the above! Making solar by far the most expensive sources of energy, only comparable with wind, in just how bad it actually is.
So, how does it work today? Well generally the wind/solar plants serve to green wash, and depending on the environment and the fuel costs of NG either make it slightly less expensive or significantly more vs the just running NG plants.
The equation works out that one installs NG plants equal to the peak load, then installs just enough wind+solar to reduce to 0 NG consumption (usually for month or so in the spring) at peak renewable production. Any installed capacity beyond that just drives up the price. Put another way, the "battery" today is a natural gas combined cycle generator, and you can only install enough renewables until the constant operational costs stop reducing the fuel costs of the NG plant. Beyond that the prices shoot up.
Now the really bad news, energy utilization has been steadily increasing, and the carbon savings have generally been going down per W generated, but the total carbon production has been holding steady or going up. In other words 0 progress over the past three decades in reducing carbon footprint.
And there is literally nothing changing over the next ten+ years. We might get another order of magnitude or two of battery production but it won't make a dent. That might be enough to electrify the personal vehicle fleet, which is ~15% of carbon emissions, it won't do anything for all the new NG plants required to back up the extra electricity generation requirements for those vehicles.
In ten years though, if we started today we could shutdown every coal plant and replace it with nukes while still increasing overall generational capacity to meet the demand created by the electric cars. And at least in the US we wouldn't have to open another mine, if we just took the existing waste and reprocessed it. And if we passed some national laws stopping some of the NIMBYism we could probably build them cheap enough to make the energy price competitive with carbon sources.
We can play around with the install vs operational cost model, but that is sorta the summary.
So, when I hear people talking about "renewables" (ignoring hydro) I hear people who don't understand energy markets, politics and engineering because even if you manage to get the market+engineering in place to support a lot of wind+solar consumption people are going to be in the streets burning down your house when they get the bill.
So, yah, there is really only one replacement for a coal plan, and its a nuke plant, and it can in theory be cheaper (Nuke plants were cheaper than NG in the past) but until the NIMBY's get out of the way its going to cost more, how much more to save the planet is a political question, but even today it should be fairly easy to do without doubling the generational price.