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Comment by Brometheus | Hacker News Reader

For the moment. There's a strong urge in Germany to switch over to heatpumps and more renewables now.

The gas is not coming back. The ministry of economy instructed city energy utilities to "stop investing" into their gas infrastructure...

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Germany is neither sunny nor windy, and is maintaining an anti-nuclear stance for the moment. I'm sure it will try a renewable play, waste tons of money for marginal results, and end up burning its local coal deposits instead. That or concede to Russian demands.

40% of our electricity comes from renewables already. And it would be much higher, if the Energiewende ("energy turn (to renewables)") hadn't been sabotaged by the same parties that wanted to use coal and gas (namely CDU and SPD).

German power consumption is around 500 TWh https://www.enerdata.net/estore/energy-market/germany/

If 40% of that was renewable, that puts renewables' portion at around 200 TWh

It's hard to find consolidated recent figures for German electricity storage capacity, but everything I can find lists it in double digit GWh at most, including battery and pumped storage capacity. https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/germany https://www.energy-storage.news/germany-growth-in-home-and-i... https://www.energy-storage.news/residential-segement-continu...

So there's clearly some creative accounting going on behind that 40% figure. Maybe it's 40% of raw power produced that then gets exported and pays for other sources or something, or maybe that 40% is strictly during the day and can't be replicated at night. But it's clear the storage necessary for a completely renewable grid is lacking by multiple orders of magnitude.

You don't need equivalent storage to energy production. I'm not sure what the ratio should be but if you're offsetting 40% of production (ie, during the day) that's pretty good.

Of course, you need baseload power generation for non-peak power, and DE really should have stayed with nuclear for that instead of pushing coal/gas.

Local coal deposits are not economical anymore, haven't been for decades. We get our coal from places like Asia and Australia.

Last time I checked Germany was among the leaders in Europe for installed PV capacity, ahead of Spain, Italy, Portugal and France. And the northern part is quite windy, ever heard of the north sea?

Instead of what? Making the switch will require tremendous effort that must come from something else, which Germany will necessarily lose (not produce). Likely this would be distributed through the economy so that there will be a bit less of everything else - shoes, haircuts, food, etc.

We will produce the solar cells ourselves again and we have two of the biggest producers of wind power plants, so there's that.

https://www.enercon.de/ https://www.siemens.com/

The most efficient appliance still needs electricity 24/7 to run. Even when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing.

We will implement storage in hydrogen for the winter. It's already on it's way (again).

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