Since the risk is there you need backup capacity anyway, and even if thermal production is very stable, usage over the day is not. So you need balancing no matter what. You do need to improve balancing to integrate lots of wind/solar - however with land-wind being so cheap, there is money to spend on balancing.
Land is cheap, sure, but the transmission capacity to take it from generation to consumption sure isn't.
Europe had electrical grids that were perfectly capable of distributing the "ancient, horrible" thermal generation quite acceptably. Now there's a lot of renewables installed the grid is starting to look like the bottleneck. Who pays for the grid upgrades so that it's not the bottleneck? The renewable people say the grid people should, and the grid people say that the renewable people should.
If there was so, so much money in the renewables market then why are they balking at paying for installing more long haul transmission lines? Probably because they're very expensive; if they were just 1% of the cost of the renewable facility nobody would really care. But they're probably on par with or perhaps even more expensive than the total plant installation. Which takes these projects from profitable versus thermal to non-profitable versus thermal I'd suspect. Hence the bickering.
So thermal balancing is a well understood art that's going on 100 years old now. Renewable balancing is not as well understood and is perhaps only 5-10 years old at any kind of scale. That's why grid batteries are such a big deal, because balancing is hard and batteries tend to have little/no latency so they can react faster than natural gas peaker plants.
I'm not saying that moving to renewables is a bad idea and that we should just stick with coal or anything; renewables are obviously the future. But there are definite, real problems associated with their roll-out that aren't easily or cheaply solved. I think one thing that will make a huge difference is exposing the time-variable pricing of electricity to everyone. It'll create a huge market for demand smoothing and consumer grade (and scale!) load smoothing devices like inverter A/C units, peak shaving batteries (1kWh battery with a 3kW inverter/charger), people putting 500-1000W of solar on their own roofs, etc.
Because thermal plants never trip??