You seem a really big fan of natural gas.

Have you heard of heat pumps? If you burn the gas in electricity plants you can get 3x the efficiency of burning gas for heat. So if the heating power of gas is that impressive to you, then renewable backed heat pumps must be about 10x as impressive.

You can even hook them up to the nuclear plants that you were supposedly advocating for before this turned into a love letter to natural gas, Russia's biggest export.

I’m far from a fan of natural gas - I’m a realist.

Have you run the numbers on capex to switch everyone to heat pumps, or looked at available grid capacity required if everyone switched?

I’m not saying it’s impossible period - I’m saying no one is being realistic about the cost or trade offs, and seems to be under the delusion that some (most of the time) fanciful faceplate capacity number and cheap price for one part of the story means everything is solved.

It’s time to do the math.

Electricity prices would be 50 cents+ if germany converted to all electric now and banned gas generation of electricity. This is on the order of a few trillion in extra cost per year (even assuming amazing efficiencies in going electric).

Near as I can tell, price could be infinite and it wouldn’t matter. Even using heat pumps, the energy required is multiples higher than all current electrical energy produced or transmitted in Germany.

The replacement for nuclear and gas for heating is basically a big capital cost to convert blast ovens / furnaces etc to electric power. Then you need to replace gas and nuclear with wind / solar + battery storage.

Let's say you can get $600/kwH for storage? If you need to cover let's say 18 hrs of energy needs (electricity and heat using electricity) that would give a sense of capital cost for the storage portion of the solar + wind package for germany as a whole? This excludes cost of conversion of course across the rest of things.

This push to dump nuclear and gas for wind / solar is going to come eventually, just not clear we are there yet in available supply / cost etc.

So I don't think its infinite, but extremely high and not overnight.

Germany currently uses about 530 billion kWh of electrical energy a year. If we assume that is evenly spread across the year (it isn’t), and we’d only need a single day to cover worst case needs (really you’d want a week probably), that is a billion kWh of storage, or $600 billion at $600 kWh. Hard to say real costs, I see numbers from $200 to $800 depending on what would be included.

If you convert natural gas heating to electric (using efficient heat pumps), that adds roughly 9x the energy needs. So $5.4 trillion. And that is just to cover average ‘overnight’, with a little buffer. If there is a problematic couple days during winter? People would freeze to death.

Energy needs would likely be more ‘peaky’ during winter, so these would need to go up a bit to deal with the spikes, but it’s probably order of magnitudeish correct.

The current German population is about 83 million, so that would only be about $65,000 for every man woman and child in Germany for the minimal best case storage needs.

For realistic ‘no mass casualty events due to lack of available heat energy every other year’, it would probably need to be 3-4x higher at least.

To protect against a 100 year storm or the like, 7-10x is probably a better idea. But I doubt anyone would ever pay that.