Germany produced 48% of its electricity via renewables this year so far. The surpluss energy will soon be used to electrolyze hydrogen that will be fed into our vast gas infrastructure.
So, another way of looking at it is - Germany is still producing most of its electricity from non-renewable sources. Adding nuclear, it's still ~40% from coal and gas [0]. So again, what surplus?
In contrast, France is producing ~70% of its electricity just from nuclear, with another ~19% from renewables.
Note that either way, the major energy expenditure that ties all of these countries to Russian gas is not electricity, it is heating.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DE...
Germany is in the process to switch over to electricity for heating, too. There are a lot of incentitives to install new heatpumps for example.
Edit: Having a mostly renewable grid with backup coal/gas/nuclear is much much easier than having an entirely renewable grid.
The whole problem with renewables is the temporal variation and lack of large scale storage.
Producing hydrogen (and potentially converting that into more traditional gasses) is a perfectly viable solution, but of course such infrastructure can only be stood up over years and decades. It's not relevant for this winter.
> They found the former has a considerably lower Capex and a payback time of only two years. [compared with Lead Acid batteries]
I wouldn't thought that a Gravity Battery would've been more efficient than compressed air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
Also TIL about geothermal heat pump energy storage: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-geothermal-ideal-energy-... :
Additionally in the winter we have complementary wind production from our windfarms.
For ~9 months of the year. For winter you need some other form of production that you can turn on at demand.
For example a panel in Helsinki produces less than 1% of its nominal output in the darkest months of winter.
edit: Just go and look at https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... if you check December of 2021 you can see that the avg output was ~2MWh/h with solar 395MW of capacity installed at the end of 2021.
It has a much smaller molecule.
And sure, having about 3x renewable generation and consuming the excess generation when it's above the demand, into producing green hydrogen, is about what the longer-term plan for electricity production looks like. There will still be times when renewables will be insufficient, on calm winter days, but infrequently, and then electricity can be produced back from that green hydrogen, but overall there will be surplus, resulting in hydrogen replacing the one produced currently from fossil fuels, for steel production and other industrial uses.