Youtube's premier economist/deadpan comedian, Patrick Boyle had an interesting video on 'Electrify Everything' a few weeks ago. It could be seen as pessimistic but I think its a fairly realistic view of the costs involved in moving away from gas and oil for transportation and household & industrial energy demand. In particular, grid capacity is going to have to at least double, if not triple. Perhaps he underestimates a push towards more efficiency (i.e. a one-to-one replacement of relatively inefficient fossil fuel-powered devices in terms of energy usage is an overestimate of demand, I think), but there's little doubt that the price of grid improvements and battery storage is going to at least match the costs of the primary wind/solar energy generation systems:
Technologically a complete transition to renewables is entirely plausible, but it's a mistake to try to play down the scale of effort needed - but this doesn't mean it's not possible. Look at the > $10 trillion in global oil infrastructure for comparison - offshore oil rigs, continent-spanning pipelines, gargantuan refinery complexes, a huge fleet of ocean-travelling oil & LNG tankers, etc. Of course replacing all that is going to be a major effort, requiring a significant diversion of civilizational resources to the task.
for transportation, there is one kind of out: synthetic fuel. It's 3x the cost of normal fuel at the moment, but in exchange you get a very dense form of energy storage that can be used with a lot of existing infrastructure.
https://youtu.be/w4WfbqE5elk
Technologically a complete transition to renewables is entirely plausible, but it's a mistake to try to play down the scale of effort needed - but this doesn't mean it's not possible. Look at the > $10 trillion in global oil infrastructure for comparison - offshore oil rigs, continent-spanning pipelines, gargantuan refinery complexes, a huge fleet of ocean-travelling oil & LNG tankers, etc. Of course replacing all that is going to be a major effort, requiring a significant diversion of civilizational resources to the task.