Parliamentarians usually stay in office a long time ( sometimes into the decades). Germany being a parliamentary democracy, there's no limit on chancellor terms.

Also, for such a thing to happen, actions need to be undertaken soon ( invest in building new power plants, ramp up the supply chain, etc.). It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's "in 10 years we'll have X".

> It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's "in 10 years we'll have X".

It absolutely is. Nothing will happen. I know Germany, I live here.

Merkel is gone. We're already at 50% renewables.

Just stopping the stopping of renewables will reach the target (for electricity).

> As of 2021, German primary energy consumption amounted to 12,193 Petajoule, with more than 75% coming from fossil sources, 6.2% from nuclear energy and 16.1% from renewables.

You might offset that 6% nuclear that is going away with renewables if you really put your hearts into it, but probably not. Won't be economical.

Most primary energy is wasted as heat when turning it into electricity. The German electrification program means they'll only need about a third of that power from renewables to travel the same distance in cars or heat the same homes.

Waste heat from a power plant in one part of the country can't be sent to heat homes in another. That's the very heart of the matter.

If you could magically get the angry pixies into all the forthcoming electric cars directly with no waste, sure.

It is very nice milestone that the top line numbers are there already, but way too early to declare victory.

By definition, the primary energy input and electrical energy output are equal for renewable sources that don't require fuel.

So the point is that transitioning from thermal electricity generation to sources like solar and wind already reduces the primary energy use.

Electrifying traffic further reduces the primary energy use, as 100% of primary energy from gas turn into something like 40% of power which can be used to drive the car forward. An electric engine is a lot more efficient.

This is just math and doesn't yet include efficiency gains through insulation, heat pumps etc.

> By definition, the primary energy input and electrical energy output are equal for renewable sources that don't require fuel.

When you think about it, this is unfairly disadvantaging renewables due to an unfortunate choice of primary energy. For renewables, the primary energy is solar radiation! Suddenly the primary energy of solar panels would go up 5 fold just because of changing the definition of primary energy. Then everyone would be talking how unfair primary energy is to fossil fuels.

You can go even further. All "natural" processes are completely excluded from primary energy use.

If you include the energy used by agriculture (as in: photosynthesis) you will get a number that human energy use is something like 99% powered by the sun.

If you include ambient heat, non-solar energy sources become a rounding error. This may seem obvious and silly, but especially in residential heating using the ambient heat with heat-pumps, solar collectors, large sun-facing triple insulated window fronts, will be key for energy usage reduction.

I would recommend the books by Professor Volker Quaschning (well-known climate scientist in Germany), he goes into lots of stuff like this in detail.

For electricity, which is a small fraction of energy consumption overall. Most of the other sources are much harder to switch economically, and raise serious health and safety issues if storage and capacity is not increased dramatically.

For instance, for Germany to be self sufficient in the winter using electric heating, even if using high efficiency heat pumps, will require massive capex. Likely on the order of 7x all they’ve already spent on their entire electric grid.

I note you don't mention how much lower is the opex or when they'd start making money on that investment? A weirdly short term view.

It isn’t much better near as I can tell for most scenarios, but you’re welcome to provide some links to analysis if you’d like. I’ve posted a number of them in other threads.

A key attribute of those analysis is the interest rates for financing, which used to be near zero - and likely will not be for quite awhile, but good luck predicting that.

> and likely will not be for quite awhile, but good luck predicting that.

It will stay at 0% or go lower. Since when did Germany stop exporting? Since when did Germans stop saving? In fact, it gets easier to save with lower interest rates because it means people don't have to pay interest to the rich. 0% debt is much easier to pay off than debt that is growing exponentially at 10% per year.

I honestly think using interest rates as a throttle is a stupid idea. It would be more logical to introduce a minimum yearly payment to principal ratio and let the central banks control that instead, it would most likely be at 3% during normal times and 6% during inflationary times. Paying interest doesn't reduce the money supply only paying off the principal reduces the money supply and inflation. Raising interest rates is actually an ugly hack to create a recession which then reduces demand for loans. If people borrow anyway, like when a government borrows to service interest, it will actually feed itself and inflation will get worse than if the government lowered interest rates and just paid off the principal to reduce the money supply. When you look at Turkey they are forcibly lowering interest rates but not paying off their debt which is weird as hell, an increased minimum payment would be more effective at removing inflation.

If you take this further and introduce a debt brake or austerity, you will most likely get deflation which then means the interest rate must be negative to avoid a recession.

Well, there are fixed principal payments - it depends on the term on the loan, and is weighted in various ways when it gets paid, but generally it’s set when the contract gets written. Otherwise, how would the lender know how long the cash would be out of their hands?

Interest rates are supposed to cover the lender by compensating them more than they lose by writing the loan (due to things like the time value of the money, inflation losses, etc).

If no one pays interest worth writing the loan for (aka they get more money than they think they would lose at the end) then who is going to write it?

Maybe the gov’t as a policy thing? But ugh. Talk about a recipe for bad loans.

And if Germany writes themselves a bunch of Euro denominated loans for $20 trln worth of electrical equipment and infrastructure that would certainly bottleneck on a few, often foreign manufacturers? Then you’ll see that trade balance get weird quick.

What percentage of German GDP are we we actually talking about to get there?

What percentage of German GDP are we talking about saving every year after that?

There is a lot of interest in the private sector to build renewables, which has often been hampered by regulation. This reduces those regulations significantly. Why do you think nothing will happen then?

Sure, it's a little late and not enough. But it's a start for now.

> Germany being a parliamentary democracy, there's no limit on chancellor terms.

Average CDU (conservative) Chancellor Term: 10.4 years - with three of them around the three-term mark.

Average SPD (socialdemocrat, including the current one) Chancellor Term: 6.7 years (not including the current one)

Germany is a conservative country, things take time, actions take decades, and chances are the next, conservative government will gut them (look up what happened to Germany's solar panel industry).

Germany solar industry killed itself. It was run by greedy subsidy collectors that cried for anti-dumping tariffs once they realized they were out produced by Asian manufacturers (and out funded by Chinese state backed banks). Germany did help to propel the solar manufacturing industry to what it is today so.

Meyer Burgers seems to be doing well.

In Germany, post-war there were three chancellors (prime ministers) that were over 10 years in office - Adenauer with 14 years, Kohl and Merkel with 16 years.

2035 target is not that far in the future - given the scale - and will require taking immediate steps. We should see if they are serious soon.

We already have 50% generation of electricity from renewables this year

I know it takes forever to do big projects, and diminishing returns are very much a thing, but 80% by 2035 feels like a really low bar.

Looking through various targets, it's far better than most countries[0], and Germany might not have the best geography for domestic renewable energy generation other than wind. (Not that it needs to be domestic. Being dependent on Russia for gas was a mistake. Being dependent on France for nuclear or Spain for solar feels a lot safer.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_renewable_energy_tar...

That's true, but many German's reaaaaaaallly love renewable energy.

Just go to any rural area in north-west Germany in google maps and look at the solar on the roofs of all the farms.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/26655+Westerstede/@53.2438...

Took me 3 seconds.

I certainly do, but a lot of people I know don't really care.

... but we used to have a policy that made it profitable to install solar power (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz).

Now it's all about the Eigenenergieverbrauch and avoiding CO2-tax, my friend. Have you heard of Leben mit der Energiewende TV?

On a sunny march day currently about 18% of all electricity is generated from solar.

Also there is a lots of wind in winter and solar works better in summer so the combination works quite well.

> 80% by 2035 feels like a really low bar.

Is this even possible? Doesn't it mean that renewable production fluctuates no more than 20%, throughout the whole year? Or, are you talking instantaneously, daytime, ideal conditions? It seems like grid scale storage that could handle these massive fluctuations (like nighttime) are pretty far off.

It would be interesting to see the cost analysis of that vs nuclear.

Oh, I assume it's much more expensive than nuclear. Personally, I tend to think of nuclear as renewable, though I guess it's not really; just carbon-neutral.

But even without nuclear I'd think it's viable, albeit expensive. You have to overbuild, add a lot of storage, and interconnect the continent (and maybe northern Africa) with high voltage transmission lines.

Domestically, night time isn't the big deal for Germany. They're 20% wind and only 8.5% solar[0]. They just need to be able to trade their wind output with countries whose wind blows at a different time.

Their geography seems like it would be good for pumped hydro storage, but they only have ~6GW capacity as of 2019[1], so maybe it's not.

[0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...

[1] https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/germany

The ecosystem impact of damming up valleys is quite strongly disliked by many.

The article describes a proposed law that has significant concrete effects. That's what you judge.

The question when evaluating long-term claims is whether there are shorter-term benchmarks specified. I'm not an expert so I don't know what specific short-term benchmarks make sense. "70% by 2030"? "Implementation underway by 2025?"

I do think it's best for the law to be a broad "this is the target" with the nitty-gritty "how to" being figured out by experts. The target should have been established by asking those experts, but I want the people tasks with implementing it to have flexibility to update the plan if things change.

If a highly-prescriptive law has been passed and suddenly we have a major breakthrough in fusion/batteries/etc., or a geopolitical event suddenly changes the availability of certain resources, the implementation details should be adjusted without having to run back to the politicians for an updated law.

Germany has passed a series of laws over the past ~30 years under the umbrella of the Renewable Energy Act (EEG), and decade by decade, that's resulted in strong renewable energy growth in Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...

Big energy projects of all kinds generally have at least a decade of preparation going into them before they come on-line. For solar and wind, this means everything from building more factories for solar PV and wind turbines, to devising and building better grid distribution systems, to incorporating large-scale storage into the system to account for intermittency.

Also I only see wind and sun mentioned. How do they plan to deal with the volatility of the supply?

One way to deal with volatility is dynamic minute-by-minute adjustment of prices, and appliances (like car chargers, water heaters, HVAC systems, etc.) that turn themselves on and off based on the price.

storage in hydrogen and allow a 80% devaluation of the energy that was used. That doesn't matter because the energy would be thown away otherwise like it is today.

Electricity->Hydrogen->Electricity loses about 60%, not 80%.

Electricity -> gasoline or kerosene has lower losses, easier transport, and safer storage.

Are you talking about renewable assisted oil extraction? There are some oil extraction methods that have a EROI below 1 which can ironically only be powered by renewables.

Easier transport than existing gas pipelines and existing/to-be-built gas caverns?

You need to upgrade those to be able to use hydrogen, but you don't lose a lot more efficiency if you upgrade the hydrogen to methane afaik.

Depends on how decentralized you can inject hydrogen from overflowing renewables, then. If you could do so at the city's connections to the main long-distance network, it might not be economical to have the infrastructure to create methane from it, and, on top, the hydrogen fraction would be CO2-free even if burnt in a normal boiler/stove. I wonder what upgrades would be needed, though? Are they not already using one of the steel alloys that is resistant to hydrogen embrittlement?

I doubt the efficiency, do you have sources? What are the chemicals you start with?

even better!

Yeah, hydrogen's the only storage medium that makes sense at that scale.

I'd expect some - actually probably quite a lot - of excess CAPEX on wind+solar, and some deficit (less CAPEX, but buying some electricity at retail) so you don't have electrolysers and thermal plants just lying around.

You're still stuck with the investment issue: either you pay (Hinckley-scale!) fees to providers to just lie around, or the public sector runs it itself, and the "private more efficient" bollocks is exactly that, because the private sector isn't providing the value. The people providing SLAs are.

The point of hydrogen is not mainly energy storage but hydrogen is the only viable way to clean up two of the most carbon intensive industrial processes: steel smelting and ammonia (fertilizer) synthesis. Smelting steel requires coal to reduce the oxygen from raw iron to carbon dioxide. The coal can be replaced by hydrogen, which will then react to water vapor. Synthesizing ammonia needs elemental hydrogen which is as of now extracted from methane (natural gas) using steam reformation. This leads to CO2 as waste product whereas electrolysis crates hydrogen and oxygen directly/cleanly from water.

You need huge amounts of "base load" hydrogen generation capacities for these industries alone. Flexible generation, i.e. produce more to soak up excess renewable energy which you can then export or turn back into electricity (at a huge loss) later, is just the cherry on top.

The initial funding will absolutely come from the steel and chemical industry (and also government subsidies to get the transformation started).

You can purify iron by electrolysis too. You don't need hydrogen for that.

But you still must get a way to put carbon in it. This is usually done by mixing the steel with CO, and the easiest way to get from renewables to CO is by reacting CO2 and H2.

The Salzgitter AG certainly thinks hydrogen is the way to go.

Well, hydrogen is a way to go.

I don't think anybody has enough information to know what is the way to go. But well, I'm an outsider with very little information.

Hydrogen is not at all required for steel melting. Look at Boston Metal. In fact I would argue its the worst solution of the two by a big margin.

For ammonia this will eventually be required.

Smelting isn't just melting, it chemically reduces Iron oxide and needs a reducing agent (hydrogen, CO etc.)

Aluminum is reduced through electrolysis. I think he means that method can be used for iron which means you don't have to use electrolysis on hydrogen.

As always the much better solution would be to build dedicated nuclear plants that operate at really high thermal energy and use that to make they hydrogen.

Nuclear neat is totally green, you actually get 100% utility out of the plant rather then having constant highly inefficient 'start-stop' operations.

And its actually a better less complex process then electrolysis.

But I guess its much better to absurdly gigantically over-provision renewables so one in a while we can run electrolysers and then by inefficent fossil fuels to drive inefficent electrolysers the rest of the time.

And its not at all clear that hydrogen as storage is actually a good idea, and its also not at all clear its the only thing that scales. It very much unproven at the kind of production scale AND storage scale you suggest. And even in the best case its incredibly inefficient and incredibly expensive make/store/produce.

Something like Iron based batteries will likely turn out to be a better solution.

Japan is going down this path.

> hydrogen's the only storage medium that makes sense at that scale.

There's more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline than in a liter of liquid hydrogen.

Electricity to gasoline produces a safe product that is easily storable for years and easily transportable requiring only minor safety precautions. Not something that can be said for hydrogen.

I mean that's a technology that could be used, but I don't see mention of it in the article. Is it in the law?

- mix of supply sources

- over provisioning

- geographic distribution

- biomethane

- international grid ties

A recent study on Germany based upon 35 years of weather data [0] shows that we would need about 24 days worth of storage to cope with this weather conditions.

[0] https://twitter.com/QvistStaffan/status/1427625795355349004?...

It's always interesting to see what ridiculous limitation they place on these to make them not work out.

Popular ones are:

Refusing to allow energy to be traded with neighbours.

Refusing to allow demand response.

Refusing to allow over building (so the installed capacity exactly matches the yearly required energy and storage needs multiply).

Refusing to target efficiency measures.

Refusing to use existing low carbon power sources (hydro, biogas).

Often they use low volume prices for a massive rollout but at least in this case they're estimating storage capacity rather than price so they won't have done that one.

edit: reading through it now, they cite other people who didn't do the above, and then state that they know some of their choices will overstate things:

> the fact that we model Germany as an island may lead to an overestimation

Guess that bit didn't fit in the tweet.

I don't fully understand this next one, but their headline number is based on running biogas as a constant baseload, which seems utterly ridiculous. They also claim that allowing that to flex with supply and demand has this impact:

> "Adding other sources of flexibility for the example of bioenergy, the duration of period that defines storage requirements lengthens to more than one year."

That's a very strangely worded sentence, with a very counterintuitive plain reading. Are they trying to intentionally confuse people? I'm not sure, can't figure out anything reasonable from the article. How can adding 8GW of flexible biogas generation increase storage requirements? Are they counting the storage of biogas?

I am not trying to defend the study, but I don't think any of your points actually mitigate the issue of volatility.

1. trades with neighbours: most european countries face similar weather conditions at the same time. The french will need their own nuclear capacity to make up for their own lack of wind.

2. demand response: switching off factories or heating when you need it? That's no solution

3. over building: the problem is that the volatility of wind is massive, if you look at the uk grid website [1], it can go to nearly zero for more than a week. If the volatility was smaller, over provisioning could be a solution (provided the economics work).

4. efficiency measures: you only make the size of the problem slightly smaller, but you still have a volatility problem. And with cars going electric and us not relying on russian gas for heating, I don't see the demand for electricity going down

5. hydro, biogas: there is only so much hydro you can build. And the places where you can build some (Sweden, Norway) leave you at the mercy of a russian submarine cutting the cable. Biogas: isn't that co2 emitting?

[1] https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Biogas is carbon negative, since you make it with manure and food waste that would otherwise give off methane.

EVs and heat pumps are over 4x the efficiency. 75% of your energy just not needed anymore to do the exact same work.

The real clincher is that most of the storage they predict is hydrogen and at the end they calculate that the crazy amount of storage required for Germany as an island is in fact, the same size as the existing gas storage facilities which can be reused for that purpose.

Which I think really rams home how utterly boring this allegedly insurmountable challenge is.

I am so tired of pretending things that aren't impossible aren't. Just do it and then reach the next level of civilization. Honestly the only reasoning I can come up with is that a handful of individuals would rather be kings than let everyone live a more advanced life.

>2. demand response: switching off factories or heating when you need it? That's no solution

It's a solution for charging the batteries inside your vehicles.

This excludes connecting further to Germany’s neighbours, e.g. using Norway’s hydro exports as a battery.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid

Ireland and Britain has massive offshore wind potential that is only being slowly ramped up, for example. Macron has announced a new nuclear reactor building program, so potentially more carbon-free electricity to nuclear-adverse Germany. The massive Danish offshore wind park/energy island has yet to come online but will supply northern Germany.

And if you want to go even more exotic, you could get 24/7/365 renewable energy by piping geothermal to continental Europe from Iceland which has an oversupply. Or even building enormous solar parks in the Sahara (geopolitical risks notwithstanding).

There are plenty of options enabled by geographic distribution of supply without even looking at storage. The main problem is the lack of political will until now, which is changing with the realisation in Germany that Russia isn’t a reliable partner.

Edit: none of these rely on any technical breakthroughs either, merely ramping up the interconnection of grids and renewable sources of electricity.

> we would need about 24 days worth of storage

Couldn't you just burn fossil fuels for those 24 days, and then do atmospheric carbon capture for the other 341?

Even if pulling the carbon out of the air takes 10 times as much energy as was released during those 24 days, that could still be achieved over the course of the year, with a reasonable amount of over provisioning.

In principle, yes.

In practice, it's far more efficient to capture right when you burn, as each ton of CO2 capture is many times cheaper then.

Hum. Over provisioning doesn't help when you have a month without wind (or you have to overprovision by like a factor of 100), neither does geographic distribution (cf UK electricity grid last year, the whole country goes down to a small production [1]).

Is biomethane considered as green? Isn't it like natural gas?

International grid ties basically means you are using coal/nuclear/etc from your neighbours, who will likely have shortage at the same time given they also have their own share of sun and wind.

[1] https://gridwatch.co.uk/

International grid doesn't mean "import whatever is on offer". You can contract for renewable energy, and fund international production capacity. Depending on Russian oil was a geopolitical (and environmental) mistake. Depending on French nuclear or Spanish solar seems much safer.

International grid ties also means:

* When it's cloudy or calm, you can import from somewhere sunny or windy. When it's sunny or windy, export to somewhere cloudy and calm. Shortages a thousand miles southwest aren't going to correlate strongly with shortages where you are, and if you if you have multiple sources a thousand miles in each direction you should be able to balance demand far better. Weather conditions are reasonably local. Demand patterns will also vary a bit.

* You can import solar from somewhere sunnier, or sunny at different. You're not going to transmit your electricity 12,000 miles east/west, but Madrid has sunset an hour later than Berlin, and demand tends to be closer to 7pm than 2am.

Yeah, it's a hard engineering problem, and there will be downsides, but we can do it if we seriously commit to it.

if you look at my response to a sibling comment, I am not convinced there is that much diversification in europe [1]. And you can tell annecdoctically, when you have heatwave news stories in one european countries, you typically get similar stories in other european countries. Europe is not that big geographically.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30934588

Wow, thanks for putting together that data!

I'm not surprised to see Germany, UK, Norway, Sweden, and Netherlands all be similar, since (I assume) they're all using the North Sea. I am surprised to see Germany's output is so similar to Italy, Portugal, and Greece. It does look like there's a decent separation between places I expect to use the Mediterranean vs. those I'd expect to use the North Sea, but yeah, we likely need a lot of excess capacity, a lot of storage, or a lot of not-wind-or-solar. (Or I guess a lot of flexibility on energy usage.)

There has never been a single hour in the last 30 years where the wind has not been blowing somewhere in Europe.

Well, the wind blowing on some hill somewhere in europe isn't of much help, it needs to be diverse enough that some countries can make up for the entire lack of production of other countries.

I am not convinced there is much diversification. I just did some back of the enveloppe analysis to convince myself. I am using hourly wind electricity production data from this source [1] which is referenced on the europa website [2] (first source I found, I don't necessarily vouch for it). I only looked at 2014-2015 (the last two years of this time series), took the daily production at 2pm (seems to be peak production and peak demand), and then calculated a weekly average of the 2pm production by country for every day. I took the low points for the UK (arbitrarily, that's where I am now), and looked at the percentile of each country for those UK low points.

So the way you read this is for the week ending 28 June 2014, when the UK was at its 1% worst wind production across 2014-2015, at that time Norway was at its 15%th worst production, Sweden 9%th worst, etc. "15%th worst" means that the norwegian production for that week was below that level only 15% of the weeks in 2014-2015.

                     2014-06-28    2014-09-09    2014-09-16
  United Kingdom             1%            1%            2%
  Norway                    15%           21%           20%
  Sweden                     9%            0%           11%
  Netherlands                1%           19%           18%
  France                     2%            9%           15%
  Germany                   23%            1%           41%
  Italy                     63%            9%           18%
  Portugal                  32%            5%           60%
  Greece                    55%            5%            8%

so you do get some outliers (Italy and Greece in the first column, Portugal in the last), but overall, all the major countries are down at the same time, so it's not Portgual that will produce the wind energy for all the other countries.

[1] https://zenodo.org/record/4803353 [2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-emhires-wind-gener...

I've looked at studies from researchers running simulations on weather data sets, and yes, you need some dispatchable sources in Europe. The question is how much you need.

Generally, the biggest issue seems to be heating in the winter. Heat is actually much cheaper to store than electricity. If you have a district heating system, you can even store it seasonally (storing solar heat in the summer) and be competitive with gas, even before the recent price increases.

I think the main reason we don't see a lot of cheapish long term electricity storage yet is that it's not needed. Once we start producing it, economies of scale will kick in. That's at least how it worked for PV, wind turbines, li-ion batteries.

Europe is windier in the winter, so if you choose a week in the summer, they're all going to be low. This is not unknown or unexpected. It's also neatly complemented by solar which has the opposite yearly cycle:

https://mobile.twitter.com/ntsafos/status/148056006004465254...

I have done all this research in like 2017 and I am so tired of all the idiots slowing down humanity's progress.

Which is great when everyone likes each other. Which traditionally is a dubious bet to place in Europe when losing it results in serious things like ‘will all the old people freeze to death tomorrow because we don’t have enough electrical capacity’.

It's ok...we're over provisioned on solar generation capacity. So it doesn't matter that it is night :P.

Do you work in the factory at night, bally0241?

I do sometimes work nights, but not in a factory. But your missing the point, there are lots of industrial processes that you don't just turn off for 12 hours because the electricity is not there or more expensive. Spooling them back up can take far in excess of that, so a 50% duty cycle is a non-starter.

I'm sorry we can't all be laptop-class software devs, someone has to make the 'stuff'.

If every country main argument is 'we just use the international grid for balance' non of this will scale.

Over provisioning one thing just means its not in another place for the first decades.

And batteries. This is only viable for a few days at most though, it doesn't work for seasonal differences.

This. Kicking the can down the road for the next generation to deal with is politics 1-0-1.

Yeah, but this is actually not at all what is happing right now in the German government.

Instead of kicking it down the road (and systematically destroying renewables) like 16 years of Merkel did, they actually started to accellerate and do immediate packages, this article talks about one that will be accepted before easter.

Got to start somewhere.

At least Germany is reasonably stable politically, not quite on the level of China but far better then the revolving door style governments seen in southern Europe.

It's astonishing how democracies can get anything done at all, right?

As if there was an underlying force, something beyond the person in charge, signing laws and making speeches.

Something like, you know a society, that can make things happen (or not).

A modern democracy is not just the ability to change leaders once in a while. It's also the fact that you get a society with clear rules, that empower people to make things happen and empower other people to back the things they like.

If enough Germans are pissed at the situation they let themselves into, they will back attempts to solve this problem, whether they come from some hand-wavy politician or by an utility company offering a green energy plan (even if it costs a bit more)

It's like a regime change, but by the people, if you so will. Regime change by vote is called democracy.

Yeah but this is not the case here. They speak about the Easter Package, which has its name from this easter.

But the title is misleading, the article talks about how the libertarians (FDP) plan to water down the target from 100% renewables till 2035 to 80%.