Recently I was looking how many electric vehicles China alone has added in the last 4-5 years and it hit me that had China not gone big on electric the world's oil consumption would be few million barrels per day more and the prices would be above $120+ per barrel.
Solar and wind could be free and it wouldn't change the equation by much .. because .. solar and wind cannot serve as baseload.
Think about it this way, if solar and wind are cheaper, why is China building coal plants? Why was Germany signing multi-decade deals with Russia and building new pipelines (at least before the war) to ship Russia's natural gas? What do they know, that you don't know?
>I predict in 3-4 years China will start removing a lot of coal from its grid as cost of solar and batteries drop another 40-50%.
There is no grid-scale battery technology today, nor coming in the next few decades - so don't pin your hopes on that. It also doesn't matter how cheap Li-ion batteries become because Li-ion batteries are simply not the right technology for grid-scale battery storage.
This is the right question to ask.
China is the global leader in battery and solar tech, yet they are building many coal plants. Why?
The answer is clear, solar and wind (+batteries) as a technology stack, cannot serve as baseload - so they cannot actually replace traditional sources of power (nuclear, fossil fuels, hydro).
The people making decisions to build more coal, and invest in Russian natural gas, understand this. The public seems to not understand it.