No, the wind analysis was not reasonable for the time - he used data from a previous generation of turbines (and in turn, the next generation of turbines were certain to be 40% bigger & etc.), from a wind farm that had quite flukey winds.

I saw him present 18 years ago, and asked him why: he said that he didn't want to rely on any predictions or models, but only discuss real data. Which is sort of defendable as a position, but ignored the fact that renewable energy was progressing so incredibly fast, and that these engineering predictions were not speculative but very much concrete.

Similarly the silicon solar panel industry in 2008 had a roadmap to get to £1/Wp over the next few years (which they did, and which led to the ~2012 explosion in solar installations), by mass producing the 'expensive' ~20% efficient (mono-crystalline silicon) technology. Mackay uses a 10% figure throughout.

So overall this was a bit like making predictions in the year 2000 assuming everyone will be stuck on 56k dial-up forever, because most people are on 56k dial-up.

These biases are present in all of the discussion of renewable technology, yet nuclear gets a free-ride / magical thinking in terms of uranium extraction, waste disposal and cleanup. And then there is the persistent obsession with land use in the book.

This led me to the conclusion (which I still hold) that this was an example of the tail wagging the dog: David MacKay wanted the 'obvious' physicists answer of nuclear power to be the natural conclusion, and by construction made it so in his book. Just because you are a Bayesian does not mean that you are unbiased!

David MacKay was an amazing scientist, but I do not think this book is accurate (even for its time), or that useful in public understanding of what we now call 'Net Zero'. It certainly popularised the idea of actually thinking through individual energy budgets, which can only be a good thing, but it was a massive missed opportunity to treat heat (chemical) energy (maximum entropy) and electrical (which can directly do work) as equivalent, just because they have the same unit.

Later on, as the 'Climate Tsar' he made a web app where you could play with the future balance of generation with a simulated model of the UK, and set your own costs for the different technologies, which I thought was much more useful. You could choose your own energy mix, and understand some of the tradeoffs.

And yes, very sad that he died so young. In the context of this book it would have been interesting to see how he dealt with the increasing mismatch of reality and his predictions as time passed.