https://zeihan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/13-globalwinds...
As for storage, with large enough over-capacity it's really easy to retrofit old coal plants to work off head capacitors, and we have plenty of those.
It's just no good if there is no political will to do it. And the "nuclear narrative" is one of the whataboutisms together with "breakthrough hydrogen tech" to distract from the solutions that are cheaply implementable today.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&...
Notice how it frequently drops to near zero. For example the morning of the 22nd where total wind+solar production in Germany was just 1.34 GW. Peak load in Germany often reaches 65-70 GW.
The people saying renewables cannot work and power must come from coal, gas or nuclear aren't evil conservatives, they are rational people who understand what renewables can and cannot do. The fact that the left systematically refuses to accept this reality is now not only destroying the European economy but flat out endangering lives. How long must the rest of us put up with this sort of rampant irrationality?
Nobody argues that renewables deliver peak power all of the time. The goal is to have enough capacity and intermediary storage to be able to deliver constant peak power with both combined.
The current economic situation would be much better had we spend all our money on renewables and storage instead of nuclear and gas, which ultimately end up fueling the very regimes that give us trouble e.g. saudi arabia, iran, russia, instead conservatives implemented arbitrary constraints like the solar cap and maximum wind farm distance.
Solar is already the cheapest form of energy per watt produced, investing into any other technology than the cheapest and most sustainable one is what's irrational.
But this is an irrational goal because there is no way to do that intermediary storage on the scale that is required, and as I just pointed out, wind and solar are frequently yielding nearly zero power even when summed together. In your other comments you're talking about pressurized air caverns and other things that are sci-fi projects right now but the crisis Germany is causing with its policies is here today.
This is why greenism is irrational. We're not talking about theoretically perfect power grids here, we're talking about what technologies exist today, to deliver the kind of stability required for a trans-national grid. Renewables aren't even close to this and there's no sign of that changing on the horizon. The refusal to accept that is now more than just annoying, it's becoming flat out dangerous.
You got way too much set phrases and trite political cliches going on for any meaningful discussion.
Solar, wind and storage are here today, they are cheaper than coal, nuclear and gas, even WITHOUT externalised costs of climate change, and long term storage.
The people that are dangerous are the ones that want to make energy politics a political game, and those that want to make as much personal profit from it as possible.
Insulated thermal for example is extremely cheap and can be retrofitted to existing power plants. All you need is a insulated steel vessel filled with something inert when heated, e.g. sand. If you want to go real fancy you could use quicklime, that could be used both as a bulk heat store and additonally releases more energy in it's hydration bonds than lithium ion batteries.
You can actually run a surprising amount of existing coal plants on iron dust, which when burned becomes iron oxide, which can then be recycled to metalic iron.
Northern germany has many salt caverns which can be used as pressurised air storage.
Southern germany also has huge pumped hydro storage potentials.
Batteries are one storage technology, there are plenty others, far cheaper if you just want bulk and dont't care about space.
* Blocked Biogas by imposing a limit on installed capacity
* blocked solar by imposing a limit on yearly added installed capacity (1GW)
* introduced the so called EEG-Umlage that made storage technologies unprofitable when used to store renewable energy
* introduced a shitshow of bureaucracy to prevent new solar and wind projects from coming online
* introduced another shitshow of bureaucracy to prevent new solar and wind projects from coming online on top of the existing shitshow
* undermine EU law by just not implementing it, for example regarding neighbours giving energy to each other
* introduced redicoulus "Abstandsregeln"/distance regulations, so for example open pit mines that use demolitions have an allowed min distance of 300m and windfarms 1000m
* When China poured billions into the companies forming China's solar industry, while German's companies had no help with their investments and funding
the list goes on and on and on and on...
On top this constant nuclear narrative, which is not even much significant for current power production, this is all beyond any funny.
Google translate those for few alternstive povs:
https://www.klimareporter.de/strom/deutschland-fackelt-gas-a...
https://www.makawind.de/index.php?show=news
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Pumpspeicherkraftw...
And this is the look of the politician in question https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Peter_Al...
