I think people can fathom a lot and demand as much. Even if the renewable energy transition happens faster than we think, we are still a decade or so late. It cannot happen quickly enough at this point.

> Hopefully entrenched interests do not let free market disrupt them this time.

Too late for that and not for a lack of trying. The IEA has been consistently, hilariously wrong regarding solar growth for almost two decades:

https://zenmo.com/en/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-proj...

Meanwhile a prototype 15MW turbine is already producing power:

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/12/30/vestas-15-mw-prototy...

Bit not in the way people would anticipate.

According to the modeling of the Fraunhofer (base assumption), we will need to double our capacity from gas (yay), double renewables to eventually achieve twice the carbon footprint of France by 2030. The base load is so high in Germany and renewables are so unreliable, that we need >100% installed capacity from “conventional” sources. The storage and “smart grid” is not really feasible or likely to happen imho.

More info: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

Disclaimer: I have PV, use ground heat in my house; I’m totally pro zero emission but Germany’s ideological decision making makes it impossible whilst pumping up prices beyond affordable.

> we need >100% installed capacity from “conventional” sources.

You already need that really. A grid going at 70% generation capacity is already considered overloaded.

I’m talking about non-renewables.

I think (and I might be wrong, but the ballpark should be right), we will have 600% capacity installed in renewables and 100-150% installed in conventional capacity by 2030. So shifting to renewables means like 700+% installer capacity, which means that when sun shines and wind blows, you will only be able to use 1/7 of the electricity produced during the day whilst also potentially running the gas turbines full steam at night. We have observed this a lot this year in Germany (e.g. wind was taken off grid because solar produced too much whilst gas and coal only delivered a minimal (?) operational load).

>we will need to double our capacity from gas (yay)

Notably, green gas, not fossil gas. You can call that conventional, but it's not adding CO2 emissions. According to their study, the CO2 factor would fall from 460g/kWh in 2020 to 150 in 2030 and between 3 and 9 in 2050. You can't just go "meh, twice as much as France" and ignore that the scenario starts at 15x France.

Well, is that notably really possible?

https://www.capital.de/amp/wirtschaft-politik/kann-biogas-ru...

Gas generation capacity is different from GHG and other pollutants caused by actually burning fossil gas. Don't be fooled by people implying they are the same.

And Germany is actually a world leader in capturing biogas, which has negative GHG emissions even after being burnt.

Having said that, Germany still burns black and brown coal so a switch to more gas instead would be a positive for them. They'd have plenty of supply if they shift to heat pumps for heating and decarbonise industry currently using the rest.

Well, don’t be fooled by “you can just replace gas by biogas”:

https://www.capital.de/amp/wirtschaft-politik/kann-biogas-ru...

Well a) you can indeed literally replace gas by biogas, b) your article suggests that we can't quickly replace Russian gas with biogas, which is true. But there's nothing that can quickly replace Russian gas, we can do a whole bunch of things (imported gas, imported electricity, imported chemicals, renewables, efficiency, heat pumps) but even that isn't a perfect short term fix.

But it's already at 5% of the electricity grid, and that's about what would be needed in a mostly renewable grid. That's the only use of gas we want long term, the rest should be phased out anyway. It's a big, epensive engineering project, but not as big and expensive as building lots of nuclear.

As your article says, think of it as a way to get rid of methane emissions from farming, with storable energy as a bonus.

You need to support 50% of the grid with new gas plants.

You *CANNOT* phase out gas plants , coal plants and nuclear and solely rely on renewables as of today (and the next 30, 50???) years in an industrialized nation like Germany.

And maybe don’t paraphrase the article like “hey its a challenge but possible”. We don’t have enough agricultural space to cover our demand. The number of (ethical,infrastructure,price) problems is so long that the idea defies reality. But you are talking about IDEOLOGY and in Germany, if you have the right IDEOLOGY, reality doesn’t matter any longer. That’s other people’s problem.

Jan Seven rechnet damit nicht. „Aus volkswirtschaftlichen Gründen ist es nicht darstellbar und auch nicht zu rechtfertigen, Biogas in dem Maße weiter zu fördern oder bestimmten Umbauszenarien zu folgen.“ Biogas sei verglichen mit den anderen erneuerbaren Energien die mit Abstand teuerste Energieform. Auch, weil Lebensmittel, die in Biogasanlagen zum großen Teil genutzt würden, teurer geworden seien. „Deswegen sehen wir beim Biogas eigentlich überhaupt keine Kostenreduktion, die wir bei Solarstrom und Wind massiv gesehen haben im letzten Jahr.“ … “ Diese Energiepflanzen belegen 15 Prozent der deutschen Ackerflächen. Insgesamt 1,5 Millionen Hektar, die eigentlich dringend benötigt werden, um dort Lebensmittel und Futter anzubauen, sagt Jan Seven. „Auf diesen Flächen wachsen keine Lebensmittel, es wachsen keine Futtermittel für die Tiere, die wir in großer Stückzahl halten. Die Futtermittel importieren wir aus Brasilien. Wir haben eine direkte Konkurrenz zwischen Teller und Fermenter.“ In einem Fermenter werden in einer Biogasanlage die Rohstoffe erwärmt und zersetzt, sodass Biogas entstehen kann.”

The article is saying that we can't expand biogas to replace all our current gas usage. Which is fine, as electricity meets most of those needs better anyway (e.g. heat pumps for home or industrial heating/cooling, renewables for the majority of electricity).

But the article also states that non-food based manure biogas could be expanded to 3x current with no impact on food (well, except to make German meat and dairy more GHG friendly). Food waste is another source that doesn't compete for land. Coal mines and landfills leak methane. New satelitte tech can pinpoint small sources and fine people that don't capture it, providing both a stick and a carrot.

So, the small amount of unavoidable gas usage, can be met by capturing stuff that would otherwise be released as methane. We already have gas storage and gas turbines. We can mix in green hydrogen too if need be.

50% is the capacity we need, not the amount of energy that needs to be supplied.

Here's a Wartsila projection for Germany suggesting 8% "flexible gas" is what's required, with 59% of peak capacity. That is, a very small amount of the year, it's used a lot. Luckily we already have large amounts of gas storage built. (Also, we've done a complete loop on this thread: "Gas generation capacity is different from GHG and other pollutants caused by actually burning fossil gas. Don't be fooled by people implying they are the same.")

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

You need to provide >100% installed capacity with gas as you phase out coal and nuclear. Because renewables aren’t reliable and you kind of need a conventional backup today.

We are missing 50% in gas plant capacity.

Your happy collection of “nice happy ideas” isn’t gonna cut it at the scale we need it to happen within 7 years. I’m so tired of this nonsense by people like you.

This isn’t some elementary science fair project. It’s people gambling away the economic foundation of Germany over some “would be nice” ideas.

I believe some of the acceleration maybe due to local generation decreasing distribution losses and the summer PV generation decreasing peaker plant ramp ups.

I think those are subtitles that are hard to judge and most likely downplayed by incumbents.

If everyone plays ball. That we will need to see. China, USA, India also need to go in hard.

Doesn't China already lead in many areas of renewables including wind and solar deployments and manufacturing? https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-widens-ren...

China also supplies the bulk of Germany's solar panel demands.

Actually China seems to be ahead of their own plans and Chinese emissions might peak in 24 and decline from that point on as they are rolling out renewables at an astonishing pace.

In the past 2 decades Germany has blown hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy. Now we have the highest electricity price in the world. It is all socialism. Zero market :-(

The price is determined by the most expensive generator. Without renewables, prices would have been even higher

> Now we have the highest electricity price in the world.

Imagine what that price would have been if the renewables hadn't been there and they bought only "green" gas plants instead.

Or "green" nuclear, but we don't talk about that in Germany anymore

Oh, but you are aware that we need to DOUBLE our installed capacity for gas by 2030 in order to be able to manage our electricity grid towards renewables, right? Page 25:

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

Nowhere on p 25 can I find this. Maybe you mean p 27, and I don't get what argument you are trying to make. Yes, there would be more gas capacity, but for green gas.

“Green gas”. You mean Biogas?

That isn’t really an option: https://www.capital.de/amp/wirtschaft-politik/kann-biogas-ru...

They likely mean hydrogen.

Like an unproven technology at industry scale to power 50% of Germans electricity need reliably - all within the next 7 years? We don’t even have fast internet. Yeah.

What's industry scale? We have the technology to burn hydrogen and we have megawatt-scale electrolysis. What else do you want?

Where do u get the hydrogen from and how do you transport it at the scale required is one of these “questions for starters”. Megawatt scale isn’t really gonna cut it - the largest one in Germany has 110 MW (?) so we would need almost 1000 of them to cover our need when the sun doesn’t shine or there aint no wind

You make it in one of the thousands of electrolyzers you build and transport it in the same way you transport natgas.

It's right in your own source that they are talking about hydrogen. Page 27

The energy is traded using Direktvermarktung and that's purely a market.

Come back with "market" once the CO2 price hits the real costs. Estimates I've seen range from 200€-700€/tCO2e. Until then we're borrowing billions of Euros from the future every year to burn more fossil fuels.