Germany's solar installations drop while new battery storage hits record | Hacker News Reader

Germany's solar installations drop while new battery storage hits record

cleanenergywire.org

6 pointsleonidasrup8 comments

This is still very, very little. Battery installations need to go another 10x up for proper energy transition, and solar installations as well, at least 5x.

Are there any estimates about battery requirements for future German energy grid?

It would be great if that were the case. But there are caveats.

During a winter anticyclone, a 5x increase in solar generation is unlikely to help. 5 x 0 = 0. Right? In summer, however, this would lead to massive overproduction. The grid physically won't be able to absorb this volume.

A 10x increase in battery storage will provide about 280 GWh of capacity. Germany's winter consumption is roughly 1.2–1.5 TWh per day. That means the 10x scaled batteries could power the country for less than 5 hours.

Yes sure renewable based energy system isn't possible on solar alone, it also takes a lot of wind and some hydro+biomass/biogas. Kombikraftwerk study simulated it back in 2014 and results were not so bad.

How much of this biomass will be imported? Lot of the biomass used in Denmark, much smaller and less industrial country than Germany, to form baseload power generation is imported.

"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."

https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark

https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...

So Denmark replaced lot of imported fossil fuels with imported wood.

Could we scale this form of energy generation to energy requirements of China, India?

Germany plans massive expansion of imports of hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives.

https://usa-germany-cep.org/fileadmin/usa/Documents/1612_Ger...

https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/EN/Pre...

Unfortunately, the Kombikraftwerk studies were modeled for a completely different country. Germany has become a different place over the last 12 years. The current scale of EV charging, the boom in heat pumps and data centers weren't factored in back then. In 2014, there was unlimited access to cheap Russian gas, which was considered a guaranteed grid balancer.

As for biogas and hydro, it depends on how you look at it. Betting on biogas/biomass doesn't really work at a utility scale in practice. The energy density of biomass is abysmally low. Replacing baseload generation with biogas would require converting a critical amount of arable land from food to energy production. Who is going to give that up?

There's a problem with hydro, too. Germany has no room to scale hydro generation. All the available valleys are already flooded.

Electricity consumption in Germany is down from 2014 actually. And the study was about electricity system with no fossil fuels at all, and assumed no addition of hydro (or storage).

They drop because I don't get any panels for 2 months now.

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