This isn't true, at least in the US: we have abundant offshore wind locations, nearly all of which are underutilized. NY alone is working on a 9,000MW offshore wind installation that'll be capable of powering 2.4 million homes (i.e., over 25% of the state.) Other regions where this holds: the entire Eastern seaboard (wind), the southeast (wind + solar), the entire Pacific seaboard (mostly solar, some wind), the gulf coast (wind + solar), and the Midwest (wind).

Besides, we're already paying the transmission cost in most places: it turns out that most people don't want to live near coal- or oil-fired power plants, which means that they need to be built away from population centers. The same goes for public fears around nuclear power.

I don't think regulators are idiots. They're paying institutional costs that aren't part of the renewable calculations, including inertia that makes changing the power grid inherently expensive. That, combined with the storage problem, are the actual reasons for slower-than-economical uptake.