Europe cannot meet its energy needs from renewables alone and will need nuclear power, solar power from deserts elsewhere, or both.

Drawn from what David MacKay said

What this subject means

nuclear power Fission as an energy source: what it costs, what it risks, and whether anything else can do the job.

On the topicHow cheap does solar get, and what does that change?under our view: The arithmetic that said it could not work was done before the price fell

What David MacKay actually said

Do you hold this korrent?Do you also believe this?

In tension with

Solar power has, broadly speaking, won the energy technology race because good, cheap batteries now make it reliable.

MacKay concluded in 2008 that Europe cannot live on its own renewables and needs nuclear power, solar from other people’s deserts, or both. Smith says in 2026 that solar with batteries has won the technological race and passed nuclear for most uses, because storage solved intermittency. Eighteen years separate them and MacKay’s arithmetic was about land and flux rather than cost, so the pair is a tension rather than a refutation — but it is the most consequential disagreement in this archive about what to build.
In tension with

The end state of the grid is not a fifth solar backed by spinning generation, but twice the demand in solar with days of storage behind it.

MacKay said Europe cannot live on its own renewables and needs nuclear, desert solar, or both. Handmer expects the end state to be roughly 200% solar generation with hours to weeks of battery storage and no spinning backup at all. Fifteen years and two cost curves separate them, and the thing MacKay held constant — that storage would stay expensive — is exactly what Handmer says changed.

Shared subject first, then similar wording. They may agree or disagree.