The toroidal Alfvén eigenmode (TAE) is an Alfvénic gap mode, which when driven unstable, can lead to anomalous energetic particle (EP) transport or even direct expulsion of EPs to the first wall. Whether TAEs become unstable depends on the combined effects of various drive and damping channels, which have strong and distinct dependence on system parameters. To enable predictive modelling of current and future devices, the global gyrokinetic code ORB5 has been used to study linear TAE phenomena with a focus on investigating individual damping and drive channels. This is enabled by code diagnostics that measure the energy transfer per-species and in terms of specific (e.g. parallel and perpendicular) components of particle motion. These diagnostics allow a straightforward study of the damping and driving mechanisms of modes that would otherwise be stable, and difficult to isolate in initial value simulations. This new method was benchmarked against other codes by calculating the energy transfer between EPs and the TAE mode with good agreement found. ORB5 has also been used to study the physics of Alfvén eigenmodes in specific MAST-U shots, with the aim of developing a predictive capability for the excitation of these modes in regimes where high beta and inverse aspect ratio mean the drive and damping of TAEs differ significantly to those applicable to conventional tokamaks and theory-based estimates. Additionally, typical kinetic- magnetohydrodynamic approaches to modelling might be inappropriate as they do not capture bulk plasma kinetic effects, which can affect TAE damping. We find that an experimentally observed TAE is marginally unstable in the MAST-U shot examined, and that radiative, ion Landau and a small degree of electron Landau damping are all present at the experimental values. We also find that an increase in beta leads to ion Landau damping beginning to dominate, confirming its expected strong dependence on , which will be even more important in burning reactor plasmas.