Renewables are the cheapest source of energy right here and now, we should invest way more into researching grid-scale storage solutions.

Also not so sure about NL being more relaxed, they have a cultural war at their hands over nitrogen emissions from agriculture, and it has shaken up their political system.

Only winter sucks because the heat pump is less efficient when it's cold. Would be great to have better storage for the grid to get cheaper energy during that time.

Renewable energy due it its intermittent nature creates a problem and does nothing to solve that problem. The cost of that solution must be factored into the cost of energy from renewable generation.

The big advantage is that solar and wind can directly reduce CO2 emissions, instead of waiting for decades for new nuclear power to come online.

Converting heating of buildings to heat pumps and cars to electrical also directly reduces CO2 emissions even if you generate electricity from natural gas.

There was one part where it went terribly wrong, and that was the idea source the natural gas almost exclusively from Russia...

Nuclear: pick ten locations -> allocate the money for each -> it goes five times over budget but in the end you have 80% of your energy need taken care of. By the time they're done, the remaining 20% is covered by renewables (we're already almost at that point. If only we had kept nuclear...).

Renewables means fighting with nearly every individual land owner in the country separately. Either they need solar panels on them or they need a wind turbine near them. Have fun and good luck arguing millions of individual cases.

The latter is cheaper per MW, people will argue. Faster to build each individual spot and no huge investments needed. All true. I just hope it's going to happen at the speed that people extrapolate from the low-hanging fruit we got so far...

Experience in The Netherlands shows that if people benefit, they are a lot less resistant. People are eager to put solar on their own roofs, if it has a good return on investment. But also wind turbines owned by local cooperations meet far less resistance than turbines owned by a big company.

Of course The Netherlands has the advantage that there is plenty of space at sea for wind turbines.

There is a not a single gigawatt scale power grid anywhere in existence that has managed to supply growing load, over extended timeframes using renewable generators.

This is the heart of the problem - we will eventually reach a stage where renewable energy powers entire grids but we are not there yet nor is the end in sight for much of the world. In the meantime, we must eliminate carbon emissions and power sources like nuclear are ideal.

NL and their stikstofcrisis is a legal thing. Individuals (on average) don't care about climate the way people do in Germany (on average). An example involving more than just direct friends and family: I wanted to join friends in NL in a protest on a global strike day a few years ago because nobody in Germany wanted to go with me, only to find that in NL there weren't any protests going on that I could propose for us to go to. A small one in the Hague or Amsterdam I think, nothing close enough for us to reasonably join. There's groups for climate in NL as well, but they're so much smaller.

Pffft...

If the government wuold decide to buy balcony solar systems for 1.000 Euro each for every household, that would come down to a mere 41 billion Euro for the whole state and that would solve lots of all of this.

They found 100 billion for the Bundeswehr without any problem in the blink of an eye. If you really wanted, the whole energy topic would be set up and solved in a month, from there on it's steady execution.

I don't know what the acceptance percentage as well as a realistic manufacturing rate is at such an order size (probably pretty fast), but it sounds like you're assuming the answers are "near 100%" and "a few years".

- Let's make it mandatory to install fixed solar systems for new development areas and any newly build commercial buildings. The state will subsidize 90% of the cost for the initial setup for private households, for companies it's just a tax deductible expense.

- You want to retrofit your existing house with a fixed solar system? That's 90% subsizidation for you, too!

- You have a multi-party house (details needed) or a professional housing company? You'll have to retrofit your buildings in 5 years of time from now on.

- Let's retrofit all public buildings with solar systems. No excuses, execution asap.

- The state will encourage research and development of energy storage sytems by providing funds to universities etc.

We'll also need to have lots of laws changed and have our energy companies put in to place, but if the cost is low for the individual person, people will just make this happen.

Yeah, it will cost some money, but the money is there, it's just an allocation problem.

Those examples stem from Germany's strong care about privacy, which is rooted in the Nazi regime, showing how data can be used to discriminate people and then the surveillance in East Germany by the Stasi.

While there are many aspects to critizise Germany did mostly well to educate the own population about the Nazi crimes (which also kept right wing parties out for a long period compared to other European countries, while that changes currently ...)

In addition the West did propaganda against East and Stasi surveillance which told the West society about the dangers of surveillance (while at the same time CIA, NSA etc had quite some power in Germany ...)

And then, after reunification, they didn't simply burn down Stasi and forget, but again did a huge program to study the surveillance programs and publishing about it and allowing everybody to request their Stasi file.

Thus on the aspect of privacy the society is confronted with the risk.

The other aspect about German culture is the pride about "German Engineering" thus thinking though and trying to avoid problems. This brought quite some industry, however in a highly dynamic field, like modern IT based systems it prevents coming up with solutions compared to the Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" attitude. Germany is. More like "move slow, but robust" Those in the early days, Germany was quite well with IT (think Use, Siemens, Nixdorf) but when the core engineering lost relevance and software took over lost ground, so that basically only SAP survived, which is a very German product, again.

Also the Nuclear exit, I argue, is partially caused by the cold war: Chernobyl caused notable increase in radiation etc in Germany, where children were forbidden to play outside, hunting mushrooms was forbidden etc. and as being located directly on the iron curtain and as one could directly observe how differently the reporting in West and East Germany was (shared language across the fence ...) it was symbolized.

Germany has a higher percentage for electricity from renewables, because for a long time The Netherlands didn't really bother with that either.

(The Netherlands is now at around 40% renewable electricity production, unfortunately that is only 15% of total energy use)