The Big Misconception About Clean Energy

The thing is that clean energy sources can't be used just on their own since we can't control them, their electricity production is unpredictable. In addition when taking into account the rare and hazardous materials needed to produce them (as opposed to a steam or gas turbine and a generator) and keeping in mind that the same materials are mostly not recyclable (for example composites used for wind turbines) they become all of a sudden not so clean. Furthermore, if you look at the life span of PV or wind tech it's usually about 20 years, compare that to fossil fuel plant's life expectancy which might be more than 60 years the negatives pile up. 
Indeed one could use energy storage systems with renewables but we don't have that kind of capabilities yet. We could use hydrogen storage and a hydrogen combustion engine - this would be doable today, but that kind of a system has massive losses - about 80% efficiency for electrolysis, ~20% loss for compressing hydrogen, ~40% efficiency for the engine, and ~98% efficiency for the generator this equals to about 25% total efficiency.

What I want to say with this is that theoretically all this is doable, but if we would implement it the resulting electricity prices would be enormous. Keep in mind the current prices which went up 2-3 times in the last year and we already have huge problems with consumers not being able to pay their electricity bill.

Hydro and geothermal are excellent options but they're geographically very concentrated.