> Do you really think that if e.g. Germany or the GB network had been centrally planned by their respective government mandated regulators and system operators, they wouldn't have put all those windfarms exactly where the market-led model we actually have has put them?

This is a huge "it depends", because we are then comparing a partly-political system with a fully-political system. The privatized model builds at the optimal locations for getting paid under the prevailing rules; the state one is much more prone to getting distracted by lobby groups. See the German over-dependence on coal and the UK conservative ban on onshore wind farms.

I will be interested to see how the deployment of affordable battery storage changes the economics. I've also seen a striking presentation about how much renewables the UK plans to deploy (roughly double!) by 2030. More on the strategy: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/clean-power-2030-...

"Clean Power means that by 2030, Great Britain will generate enough clean power to meet our total annual electricity demand, backed up by unabated gas supply to be used only when essential."

(note details of wording)