Moving from fossil is less convenient, not more. So, we're stuck.
Seems more like a lack of political will with powerful lobbying interests opposing it and misleading the public. Fossil fuel companies could have listened to their scientists in the 1970s and changed their business models for a transition to cleaner tech a lot sooner.
They get turned into plastics and energy, two things which civilization feeds on voraciously.
It's not just inertia that keeps them going.
It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
That doesn't make sense. Batteries are an energy container, they're not energy itself. How can it be compared to a fuel? The direct counterpart to oil or coal is wind or solar radiation itself, batteries are used to amortize the supply and store an excess for emergency use, but otherwise those types of energy just immediately go into powering the grid.
The economic case for renewable power is actually extremely good, because unlike fossil fuels, they're effectively infinite and don't need complex infrastructure to extract. They're free. You only need a power plant that directly converts them into power. If we were just able to shift fossil fuel demand towards producing goods like plastics, this would already be massive. However, a lot of powerful people are deeply invested into fossil fuels and will do anything to tip the scales into their favor, despite gradually losing in the energy sector.
"It depends" is the correct answer, but the equation is shifting quickly towards solar + electricity.
Solar + electricity are not directly suitable for powering electric vehicles, that's where the batteries come in.
Comparing apples (transport of electricity via wires) with oranges (transport of energy via liquid or gas) misses the elephant in the room: you are not going to be able to use those electrons without a suitable temporary storage medium unless you plan on carrying a very long and impractical extension cord behind your now very light EV.
So, how did we achieve what little we have? Well, because many people have cared, and have made the right decisions. Not enough people, or maybe not good-enough decisions, but some people, and somewhat good decisions.
So, what were the decisions which brought us down from an apocalyptic +4°C to a very bad 2.5°C path? Was it enough consumers making environmentally conscious choices, even if they were less convenient or more expensive. No. It was enough voters wanting their leaders to do something, even if it wasn't quite enough, but it was something. And something isn't nothing.
We will never have enough people voting with their wallet to fight climate change, because our rational understanding of the big-picture cannot overpower our intuitive day-to-day choices. However, we may have enough people voting with their ballot to fight climate change, because the rational big-picture can, sometimes, decide whom we vote for.
AI could very well put us back on it.
There is also a finite number of consumers of AI content on the planet - sure maybe everyone want 4k-per eye live feed video of anything they want 24/7, but once you accomplish that for all 8 billion humans, there is no further demand for it.
Generation costs are very likely to continue to trends rapidly downward and there is a likely final wall of saturation of demand.
For big reactors: At current aluminium prices, the bill of materials for a global power grid with 1 Ω resistance the long way round is only about 10x the cost ITER (the organisation) expects ITER (the reactor) to be. Plug in your own numbers for target resistance as desired, halve resistance needs double the material.
With such a grid, you can put the PV in Angola and still get useful output in mid-winter nighttime in Anchorage.
For potential small reactors like Helion's "shipping container" target size, I won't say it can't work (I don't know enough to be confident), but I will say that we immediately find we have bigger problems because any hostile actor can simply choose to run them in neutron-source mode and turn everyday cheap depleted uranium* into weaponizable plutonium.
* I note that eBay still clearly has a dictionary merge on all nouns, given my search results came up with this:
Get the best deals for Depleted Uranium Metal at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items!
But where did you take those grid cost numbers from? Iter costs are <100bn AFAIC; and Germany alone (!!) projects more than that (top end) for grid expansion/operation within 2040 (mainly north/south and offshore connectivity).
For the material cost, just applied maths. By sheer coincidence, 1Ω of aluminium around the world is very close to 1m^2 cross section: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=40000km+*+resistance+al...
This is almost exactly 1e8 (100 million) tons: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=40000km+*+1m%5E2+*+dens...
This is $223bn at current prices: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=40000km+*+1m%5E2+*+dens...
For scale, this is about what China makes in 2 years; if this is rolled out over 30, which would be optimistic but plausible, it's within the realm of just how much China increased production between 2023 and 2025, being spent every year.
To get to 10x ITER's own estimate for ITER, the wikipedia page says the organisation estimates the reactor will cost about €18-22bn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
There are a lot of reasons not to do this as a single big 1m^2 "wire", amongst them being that the surface magnetic field is strong enough to be dangerous to approach with ferrous materials.
But because Nimbys have no appreciation for beautiful pylons, projects in that direction are doomed for now anyway and everything needs to be buried underground at extra cost :(
Pylons… eh. Doing this realistically rather than my napkin-maths, it would be a mix of many different solutions in different parts of the world, from competing environmental issues. Some would be pylons, some underground cables. Is the Sahara dry enough to run it on the ground, or in a concrete trench? I have no idea.
As a side note, every so often I keep being surprised on here by Americans who can't rely on the grid in winter because snow disables it, and some Californian forest fires are attributed to unmaintained pylons failing, dropping live wires onto the forest where they spark and light up the dry wood. These could both be resolved by burying more cables. Likewise within urban areas: here in Europe it's rather rare to see overhead lines in urban or suburban areas, unless they're over a tram/railway line.
IMO the real killer of any project like this, is geopolitics, not local politics. EU doesn't trust China, the US, or Russia; the current US administration doesn't trust or doesn't like basically everyone; Russia kinda gets along with China but few else; China would like to sell stuff to everyone but also have border disputes and other friction with many of their neighbours.
Honestly the "1m² around the world" is probably a pretty good proxy for what we would need to solve intermittency problems exclusively by boosting grid connectivity (instead of storage), rescaling this to 4m² cumulative cross-section could probably transport the total global electrical energy consumption over ~10000km (but the losses would get uncomfortably high from an economical point of view after crossing the 1000-2000km distance threshold, so you might want even more aluminium when you desire connections that long).
Btw: Underground cables instead of pylons are absolutely a nimby thing. Not only is it much more expensive, because you pay for the earthwork and additional insulator, but it also limits your voltage (to avoid overpaying for insulation even more).
Return current is typically free, either from balancing 3phase AC or because decent electrodes get you <1Ohm over any distance thanks to math for the DC case. Just talking high voltage here; for short range, lower power residential connections the situation is different.
Fossil fuels are profitable for a small group of powerful people, and they spend vast amounts of money to spread falsehoods.