I haven’t watched the movie. So I don’t know what he’s saying specifically.
I used to work in a solar power lab, I have a masters specializing in the physics of designing and manufacturing solar cells, along with other semiconductor devices, and I’ve broadly kept up with issues relating to our energy economy since I moved to a more lucrative and stable industry than solar.
I think we could plausibly build enough storage to get to about 80% intermittent renewables (solar and wind). It would probably cost $10-20 trillion, though that doesn’t include major grid upgrades. (Note that that figure is for the storage, not including all the other infrastructure upgrades that would be required, like switching to electric vehicles, etc.)
I think it is not at all plausible to get from 80% to 100%, in the foreseeable future. We will still need ~20% non-intermittent base load power.
The only carbon-neutral source of baseload power that we can deploy everywhere is nuclear. I think people who have a problem with using nuclear for base load mostly don’t really viscerally understand how bad climate change is likely to get. It’s not that nuclear is without danger, or problems, it’s that the danger is much lower, and more localized, than that from carbon emissions.
