Technology

Yes, we need more storage and generation. The author didn't say we're all good and nothing more needs to be done. What's noteworthy is that renewable energy is cheaper than CO2 emitting, and battery storage is cheaper than peaker plants. (And grid battery can come from things like salt, sand, brick along with better known components like hydro storage, doesn't have to be rare earth elements)

It's ok to acknowledge when good things happen while also recognizing bad things.

True.

And while we wait we keep our factories running, our cars on the street, our planes in the air, our meat on the tables, our plastic wrapped around everything and keep believing that we will be just fine.

It doesn't have to be storage, another option is building over capacity so it's winter output is sufficient then using the excess in summer months to perform useful work.

For example a desalination and pumping station at the mouth of the Arizona River, you can scale the pumping from a storage lake by the desalination plant to one or more of the upriver lakes raising their water levels to replace the water used for industry and agricultural.

Carbon capture and manufacture of e-fuels or similar is another great possibility, it can be scaled with energy production vastly reducing the cost of the process and allowing further transition from oil in areas which might otherwise be difficult.

E-chems are important because there's a few things which are vitally important to modern industry but currently produced fairly cheep as an oil by-product, if demand for oil derived fuel declines as we hope and production falls dramatically then the price of those chemicals would skyrocket - being able to transition into using sequestered carbon would save a lot of difficulty, and if it helps create a market for sequestered carbon it could help us start bring atmospheric co2 ppm down slowly.

until these get produced for real in mass quantities, they are vaporware

The world is already seeing exponential growth in annual completion of grid scale battery storage. Here's some recent data in the US, as products and projects mature from theoretical to small scale prototypes to full scale pilot projects to full production.

And author should compare winter moths

There's also significant developments being made in geothermal, which is actually dispatchable. Plus we actually still produce more grid-connected wind than solar right now, it's just that solar is so damn cheap it makes sense to install capacity well beyond matching peak demand.

Some combination of overcapacity, demand-shifting, and storage will go a long way in reducing the amount of dispatchable fossil fuel capacity that is necessary.

Grid scale storage has come a long way. There are saltwater batteries and flow batteries in use now, those technologies are here, they're just still being iterated on and improved. And as the renewables get increasingly affordable, the demand for storage will rise with it. Now we're still mostly deploying expensive lithium batteries, but as more of that gets installed, the demand for cheaper storage will skyrocket. And production generally follows demand.