Batteries provide fast response
Pumped hydro is what is being used on a lot of networks and in future network planning. Ironically old open cut mines are often perfect locations for them.
This paper discusses an algorithm used to find pumped hydro sites - there is _a lot_ of capacity out there waiting to be tapped
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
There are already numerous draft or under constructions plants that are "triple" projects with a combination of solar/wind + battery + pumped hydro
Eg, Bath County Pump Storage is a 3GW plant[1] although ironically it is often filled using nuclear power because the hydro station can adapt better to rapid changes in demand.
In the US there is 22GW total pump hydro storage already (compared to say 98GW total nuclear power capacity).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
"The perception has been there are limited sites for pumped hydro around the world, but we have found hundreds of thousands."
https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
Some depend on geography, particularly pumped hydro and mineshaft gravitic, and to a lesser degree compressed air. Catalytic improvements will bring rapid cost decline in LH2 and ammonia production. And, finally, battery technology, still the most immediately practical for home systems, is still improving fast. Any breakthroughs not anticipated only improve the picture.
The cost for utility-scale solar is many times less than roof-mounted, battery-backed home systems, but in places where distribution is expensive (rural) or unreliable (3rd world and California) it has strong appeal.
The reality is it doesn't matter how you word it or what you think should be simpler. Its what the economy can actually build, and including risk, buying solar panels which have no moving parts and last for decades are currently the more efficient way to add a watt to the grid.
Your "blunt" assertion where you predict the capacity of the grid to accomodate renewables and the quantity of battery storage and the feasibility of every potential upcoming storage technology probably requires a few sources to be taken seriously as well.
The point is, just adding watts to the grid is not a solution. You needed watt when they're needed and where they're needed. And doing that with renewables is a lot harder, hence why we're really just supplementing fossil fuels with wind and solar not really working towards full decarbonization.
My assertions about the capacity of battery production were indeed backed by sources of predicted growth of battery production. In case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283498
Let me put it more bluntly. Renewables are indeed cheaper on a per-watt hour basis. But that's more than offset by the need to deal with intermittency. Batteries are great for cars, but they exist at nowhere near the scale required to decarbonize with a wind and solar generation base. More exotic proposals like thermal storage, hydrogen, or the Sabatier process remain in prototyping and academic stage. The cost of storage is a non-answer, because there's no real plan to build this storage.
Renewables make in a stopgap mitigation plan but we have no feasible way of building a grid that's powered completely or even mostly by renewables. If our plan is to decarbonize the energy sector, renewables do not offer a solution. Hydroelectricity, and geothermal power do, but those are geographically limited. Nuclear energy is the only source that can feasibly replace fossil fuels as a consistent, geographically independence, and carbon-free energy source.
TL;DR:
* Industrialization happened because we figured out we could heat water and push a piston (and later, spin a turbine). Modern society is built off the ability to produce mechanical and electrical energy from thermal energy.
* It's a lot easier to heat water and spin a turbine with a carbon-free source of heat, than to try and capture energy from sun and wind and store massive amounts of energy to overcome intermittency.