To be clear, I am not advocating for nuclear energy. I don't have a preference for one non-fossil fuel energy source over an other. It is good to see that off-shore wind is becoming much more viable.
That slide deck repeats over and over that renewable prices have come down. That's great, but as I said in my original comment, it is hard to find actual calculations about this being implemented in a real country rather than breathless exhortations about the coming revolution.
That MacKay report is valuable for the energy distribution numbers - for example, it talks about the massive amount of panels and windfarms that would be required to meet demand and that this is unlikely to be feasible (notwithstanding the fact that the UK isn't very sunny). Maybe this isn't so true any more, but you seem to be saying that the UK should install an even more than massive amount of renewable capacity, along with various storage solutions to store the excess (presumably to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar). Maybe I don't have that right, but it seems to me to be overly optimistic. The recent energy crisis in Europe would seem to suggest that is the case in the medium term.
The "energy" crisis in Europe is a fossil fuel crisis, not a general energy crisis, the same as so many energy crises in the past, but this time the fossil fuel companies excellent PR engines have been able to cast it as the fault of energy sources that are not dominant on the grid.
The MacKay report was hopelessly and fruitlessly pessimistic on renewable energy, while embracing fraudulent technology like "clean coal" that has proven over and over to be a scam. It's not a fair shake at the world, and much less at the UK. I've been revisiting it since your comment, and though I thought it useful when I first read it, I no longer think it is helpful in understanding the scale of what we can do, and what needs to be done.
The RethinkX report I linked is one sort of model about a future energy grid, using very rough details. Christopher Clack's modeling is far more fine-grained, and his latest models are using historical weather combined with modeling down to the distribution node to run cost optimization strategies. I don't think he's fully published his latest yet (which shows huge cost savings by doing massive storage and solar deployments to homes and businesses within the next five years). But other reports are here:
IMHO, 90%+ renewables by 2040 is a foregone conclusion for 90%+ of the globe, unless governmental corruption requires that people are bilked by the coal and natural gas industries. The key design question for grids is going to be about the amount transmission & storage versus and amount of excess generating capacity from renewables nearby. Transmission is expensive, and not falling much in cost, if at all, so I have a feeling that future and new grids will have much less of it. Looking at those curves from Naam's slide deck should make you think about where we will be in another decade, or in two decades. Our current energy system has costs are split roughly equally fixed capex and fluctuating opex (based on fuel costs). The future grid will have nearly zero opex, and drastically lower capex. For the extreme outliers like the UK, they may lay down a few dozen GW of high-voltage DC to higher resource areas.
That slide deck repeats over and over that renewable prices have come down. That's great, but as I said in my original comment, it is hard to find actual calculations about this being implemented in a real country rather than breathless exhortations about the coming revolution.
That MacKay report is valuable for the energy distribution numbers - for example, it talks about the massive amount of panels and windfarms that would be required to meet demand and that this is unlikely to be feasible (notwithstanding the fact that the UK isn't very sunny). Maybe this isn't so true any more, but you seem to be saying that the UK should install an even more than massive amount of renewable capacity, along with various storage solutions to store the excess (presumably to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar). Maybe I don't have that right, but it seems to me to be overly optimistic. The recent energy crisis in Europe would seem to suggest that is the case in the medium term.