You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important.
When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out.
If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.
You can make all the theoretical arguments you like, but the empirical data (California, Germany, and more) disagrees with your conclusion. Perhaps you should consider a more serious argument that actually agrees with the current evidence.
What? Experience in Germany and California is completely consistent with what I was saying. Of course natural gas without sufficient CO2 charges will continue to cover intermittency, especially when there's a great deal of already installed gas capacity whose capital cost is sunk.
Why is Germany reopening it's coal plants if not to make up for the intermittency problems of renewables?
If intermittency issues caused storage to be quite attractive, why hasn't storage already been rolled out across Germany and California?
Neither if these claims agrees with what happened in these two cases. Any electrical engineer could have told you storage is needed before decommissioning nuclear in favour of renewables.
