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If you look at the data from the EU, you see a noticeable inflection around 2010 in the production of electrical energy generation from bio, solar, and wind (wind being the largest contributor). How come then?
Thats when the subsidies really kicked in. The Renewable Energy Directive, which is the EU mechanism to achieve decarbonisation was agreed in 2009 and set targets out to 2020.
Certainly will be a mix in the future - we're probably going to need some new nuclear, but with wind and solar and some storage solutions we might get close.
Importantly you still need to create a reason to generate renewable rather than use gas - The Renewable Obligation was good because it obligated suppliers to generate a certain amount of renewable power, and provided a subsidy to achieve that. Something similar, but without or very low subsidies seems important to me.
Anyway, we're way off Musk now.
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Scrabble
The cost of renewable generation has come down massively though, and with enough investment can easily come down further.
If you look at the data from the EU, you see a noticeable inflection around 2010 in the production of electrical energy generation from bio, solar, and wind (wind being the largest contributor). How come then?
People miss that fossil fuels are currently cheap because the infrastructure has predominantly already been paid for.
The challenge is renewables currently don't seem to offer one solution. The future looks more like it will be a mix. Still there is so much scope - even when you look at how under utilized biogas is given how much food, etc. we waste.
At the moment it seems like off-shore wind is where it's at. But even solar has dropped in cost.