You are so close to some valuable truths here, I admire your thinking, given you maybe still don't have any formal systems engineering experience, but you are not quite hitting the nail on the head, if you are really seeking solutions, rather than just to make some money from a story.
You will know when you've got this right, because your story will go to the very bottom of the pile, pushed there by algos designed for profit. Your story will be worthless by their definition of value, because your story will be anti-profit, and algos only understand profit, they literally can't comprehend or make sense of anything anti-profit, its a different language from what they speak, at least negatively powered algos. ChatGPT is different, as you might find out soon.
For your analysis to be consistent, you have to discriminate between stored energy, and energy, and you need to strictly maintain this for the maths to stack up and be checked out, it all needs to check out.
Mr Smil is exactly correct when he talks about energy being the currency of nature, this is my evaluation also, from a physical systems Engineering point of view. I don't know his background but will look, thanks for mentioning his name.
"Renewables" is a nonsense term that looks like it was delberately created to confuse. As long as you use this terminology, bunching "solar" in with that, you can never really work through the energy system, it is impossible to audit energy without at least mathematically signing it according to where it comes from, the source (The sun - positive), or somewhere else where we might extract it from whatever medium onj Earth it is stored in (Negative).
We have to treat it like currency, positive is energy paid into the planet, like by the sun, and negative when we draw it back out of the planet.
By the failure to do this, the energy giants and energy slavers destroying the planet love you, you dutifully use their terminolgy, and by that you can never really show exactly how they are doing the damage.
Without doing this, its impossible to discriminate even the difference between creation and destruction, or what actually drives temperature at source, before we get into things like CO2, which are just symptoms of the root problem, of doing everything by mathematically negative energy.
This is what has always been, including at the root of slavery, it was always energy slavery, until we got actual explicit technology to pull in Joules of energy direct fom the sun, just like the leaves of a plant.
Now we've got that, it could change everything, including ending slavery and colonialism, if you understand it, and let it happen, even encourage it to happen.
I think I've been through the analogy of the energy flow in a plant with you before, yup, I remember, you didn't accept it then either, so I guess you probably won't accept this:
https://eric-bott.medium.com/more-around-the-subject-of-energy-slavery-2384446c4e8e
or this:
https://eric-bott.medium.com/the-energy-polarity-multiplier-framework-fb4215b55862
or this:
or this:
https://eric-bott.medium.com/the-fuel-tree-5ef66be03c4
or this:
https://eric-bott.medium.com/could-bitcoin-be-a-kardashev-hinge-b5d92df02795
or even this:
https://eric-bott.medium.com/investment-temperature-cost-e4bc859c37f4
Every one of these stories, and many more I write are dashed to the bottom of the pile, because they are bang on the anti-profit nail, quite an act you have to follow, if you really want to sort out, or help sort out the energy problem, or even the slavery / colonialism problem :)
But if you just want to write another clickbait story with some buzzwords, why not, everyone else is doing it.
