[mduerksen]

The article succumbs to wishful thinking in critical areas:

"So yes, Germany has a lot of gas-fired plants, and a lot of coal-fired plants, but they are actually used very little - only when demand (including from France) is very high and renewables supply is very low - which does happen, but not that often anymore."

This will continue to happen for the foreseeable future during the winter months. Solar is almost neglible, and wind obviously has slumps.

To fix this problem, the article brings up the recurring theme of saviour technologies that simply are not there yet: "flexible generation, whether hydro, new forms of storage"

Total consumption for 2021 in Germany: ~500TWhs [1]. That means ~10TWhs per week. At the moment our storage capacity is in the small GWhs ballpark [2]. We would have to increase this thousandfold. I haven't seen this gap adressed with actual projects yet.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/164149/umfrag...

[2] https://www.erneuerbareenergien.de/transformation/speicher/w...

[silvestrov]

I don't think this is wishful thinking as Denmark is ahead of Germany in switching to renewables and Denmark is already in the situation you quote.

Many people completely ignore how well EU contries are interconnected and how EU is pressuring Germany to become even more well connected to other contries.

So electricity generation in EU should never be considered at country level only.

Today it is windy in Denmark. Wind mills produce 103% of current consumption, solar 33%, bio/coal 17%. Surplus is exported to Norway, Sweden, Nederlands and Germany.

During night time this often switches around and we import from those contries. Most days wind blows in Denmark during day time and not during night time, so we are extra hard hit by up-and-downs in renewable generation.

Tech for long distance transmission of electricity has also improved a lot over the past years but this is often ignored when speaking about renewables.

[mduerksen]

Lack of sun/wind in Denmark correlates strongly with lack of sun/wind in Germany and surrounding countries. The importing of electricity works precisely because the surrounding countries still have the "baseline" power plants the article dismisses so boldly.

Transmitting electricity over larger distances remains very expensive, which is why the idea of using the African sun for Europe (e.g. Desertec[1]) has stalled [2].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmcgdh_0gyo

[bayesian_horse]

"Flexible generation" also means coal and gas... So it is not an elusive technology. Neither are hydro power plants which can be varied in their output.