point is that oil, gas, and coal face serious competition from other energy sources

While I don't entirely disagree, this seems so over simplified I question its usefulness.

Coal is the easiest one here: coal doesn't face competition from other energy sources, it faces political and regulatory blocks. It's dirt cheap to dig up a rock and burn it. But it gives off a lot of horrible stuff.

Oil is so useful because it's easily transported and very energy dense. Batteries are the only alternative that comes close, and they're still and order of magnitude or two away from oil's energy density. They gain some ground back on the cost of energy; electricity is so much cheaper than oil.

Gas is really beyond me to speculate. Gas is so cheap right now, and gas fired power plants cheap and fast to build. But I also understand gas is seen as a byproduct of fracking for oil. If oil dries up, if fracked dies off, is gas screwed? I remember when gas prices shot up in the early to mid 2000s.

For all of this, storage remains the holy grail. A ton of coal has about 8000 kWh of energy. By the time we burn it and boil some water, we're left with about 2400 kWh. Coal power plants have stockpiles of hundreds of thousands of tons of coal. Replacing that kind of flexibility with batteries will require a materials and cost breakthrough we haven't seen yet. While the technology exists, it's so far off on cost that it isn't achievable at the scale necessary. All the gains we've had in reducing carbon and coal have been paid for by fracking and natural gas.