No, solar and wind are not cheaper than conventional sources (especially combined cycle natural gas turbine generation). They only appear cheaper if you use the flawed metric of LCOE.

LCOE - Levelized Cost of Energy does not come anywhere close to capturing the true cost. It is only the cost of the facility and fuel.

Solar, and wind, are intermittent sources of energy. They do not produce on demand, but rather when the sun shines or the wind blows.

This means that a grid with even modest levels of intermittent energy needs expensive backup capacity to provide energy when the intermittent sources are not producing or not producing enough. Those sources are conventional sources, and it means that you are paying twice for the energy - once for the solar, and again for the backup plants, their onsite fuel, their maintenance and their transmission facilities.

So far, there is no storage solution that comes anywhere close to reducing that large cost. Batteries are prohibitively expensive except for very short term use, such as the reactive power provided by the large Tesla battery in Australia. There is nowhere to put pumped hydro that is not very expensive. Hydrogen is very thermodynamically inefficient, when you look at energy lost in hydrolysis, compression, cooling, and then reconversion back to electricity through fuel cells or combustion in turbines or engines.

Also, LCOE doesn't capture the costs of building new transmission facilities to tie the solar and wind farms into the grid.

These source may look cheaper now, when they do not produce enough to destabilize the grid (requiring the backup sources), and when they are heavily subsidized.

For example, in Texas, wind is so heavily subsidized that wing producers *pay* the grid to take their power! In other words, they have power that isn't wanted, but they get paid if they generate it, so they pay pretty high fees to the grid to take it during those times. The result of this is that conventional plants are not paid during those times, and some are being decomissioned as a result. That will only lead to power outages in the future, if the trend isn't corrected.

Don't be fooled.