Solar works great in Germany. Admittedly, there are better places in the world for solar, but it works. At noon today, about 50% of the total electricity in Germany came from solar. We need much more of solar, but until all rooftops have been filled with solar, it basically comes at zero land usage and at that point, the grid could be powered on many day entirely on solar. Add on top widely extended wind power.

AFAIK solar energy accounted for 10% of German energy generation in 2021

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany

Right. I wrote about peak output today, which is admittedly a sunny day. But just doubling the amount of solar installations would mean that Germany could run at times entirely on solar. That definitely means "solar is working". And a tenfold increase in production is absolutely feasible, we have so many rooftops alone.

Add to that a greatly increased wind production capacity, and Germany is pretty close to even replace most usages of fossil fuels outside of electricity generation with renewable energy.

> But just doubling the amount of solar installations would mean that Germany could run at times entirely on solar.

Remember that

Germany has about the same solar potential as Alaska [1]

Capacity factor for solar in Germany went from 5.7% in 1990 to 11.1% in 2019.

Even increasing it at 10%/year to double it would take 7-8 years.

It's not that simple to "just double it", Italy makes 43% of its energy from renewable sources, it's mainly hydro thanks to our geography and it's been like that since at least 20 years, but the numbers aren't going up very rapidly, there's a limit on how many dams you can build.

Also, renewable like solar and wind are increasing and replacing the thermoelectric (gas, coal, fossil in general), the problem is we still have to buy at least 10% of the required energy from other countries, that might or might not use fossil to produce it.

The point is not if we will be able to use 100% of renewable energy in the future, the point is "can we wait long enough for them to reach that point, before it's too late"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Potenti...

In 2010 or 2011 solar capacity was increased by 10GW in one year. We are currently at about 70GW, so it would take 7 years at the 2010 rate - one would assume that with much more efficient panels available today, the first doubling could be easily done in 5 years and obviously we might try much harder today than we did back then, when it was not critical yet. I wouldn't see why we couldn't do 20 GW/year today and more in the future. Going to renewables certainly is a 90/10 style problem, but as we are very much pressed for time, we should push for the 90 quickly first and then tackle the rest. And if we hit 20GW/year solar buildup and also have strong wind buildups, we might quickly have enough to just use power2gas and the existing infrastructure to bridge the gaps in the supply. And of course, some amount of importing is acceptable too. If Arabia and northern Africa build up large hydrogen plants, we should buy that too. Helps achieving our goals quicker, gives those regions important income. But of course, we shouldn't make us so much dependant on a single suppler any more as we did with gas.

What other ways would we have to achieve this goal in short notice?