These Western countries are also still exporting their manufacturing and energy use to China. Meanwhile, Chinese CO2 emmissions are still increasing, regardless of how much renewables they are building. This would mean that the marginal cost of burning coal is still lower for them than the "dirt cheap" renewables, when accounting for everything. Either that or China can't count, which I doubt.
In any case - displacing fossil fuels is cheaper than operating a fully renewable grid - because you have the luxury of simply dialling back gas or coal production when it's windy and sunny. The proble starts when you dont rely on these at all - this is my point. I haven't seen this happen anywhere or anywhere close to it either.
It's one thing to provide some marginal power generation in a grid based predominantly on fossil fuels, and another to do the same thing without that backup. The typical solar PV plant doesn't care at all about energy storage - it's someone else's problem, and hence cost as well.
Why would you expect people to go for fully renewable grids right now? You'd need no pre-existing dispatchable power for that to be appealing to start with, and this is the case approximately nowhere (excluding countries that get free hydro from their geography here).
Electric storage to get rid of the last percent of dispatchable fossils in the grid is invariably gonna be the last thing that happens because its just not appealing economically; future overprovisioning is gonna eat into your margins, capex for batteries is non-negligible and you are basically making a longer term investment into rapidly improving tech which is always rough.
But just consider a single household right now: You can just slap panels on the whole roof for peanuts and put 100kWh of batteries somewhere (that's basically a single chunky car-battery)-- that's pretty much autarky right there, and it is very feasible (but if you rely on a bit of dispatchable fossil grid power instead that's still cheaper and easier for now).
In my opinion all that we would need to accelerate this tremendously is like a $300/ton in carbon tax, then just re-emit the gains into mainly lower income tax brackets (poor-ish people might even come out ahead!) and tax literally every import comparably that can't demonstrate a clean chain of the same CO2 taxation for its inputs. But people would wine endlessly, because suddenly flying into vacation 3 times a year or similar BS becomes actually expensive, oh the horror...
In any case - displacing fossil fuels is cheaper than operating a fully renewable grid - because you have the luxury of simply dialling back gas or coal production when it's windy and sunny. The proble starts when you dont rely on these at all - this is my point. I haven't seen this happen anywhere or anywhere close to it either.
It's one thing to provide some marginal power generation in a grid based predominantly on fossil fuels, and another to do the same thing without that backup. The typical solar PV plant doesn't care at all about energy storage - it's someone else's problem, and hence cost as well.