Of course there is sun in Germany. Yes, there's less. But then it's also cooler which makes the solar panels more efficient. What matters is if it's economical to use solar panels there, which it is. In summer, where some areas will use quite a bit of AC, there's more daylight hours than regions further south. In winter, if you have vertically mounted panels, a nice effect you can get is that the snow reflects extra sunlight from the ground to the solar panel.
Fun fact, even the airport in Longyearbyen in Svalbard, Norway - an island close to the north pole - has solar panels. They're mounted vertically on the walls, since the sun is never very high in the sky. There's no sun at all in winter, but in summer there's sun 24/7.
https://sunpower.maxeon.com/int/case-study/energy-arctic-cir...
It's surprising how much production they get even that far north: "the PV system produces as much as 70 percent of what is typically produced in Germany"
So please don't use your subjective impression about how bright you feel it is to gauge the viability of solar. I can tell you from personal experience, it's not very bright in Svalbard even in summer.
BTW, much of the energy need in winter in northern climates is for heating. It's surprisingly effective to store thermal energy over several months. So it's actually viable to dump heat from excess solar in a thermal reservoir in summer, and use that heat in winter.
Do tell more.
[1]: https://www.vantaanenergia.fi/en/we/carbon-negativity-2030/h... [2]: https://tem.fi/paatos?decisionId=0900908f8077a0e8
And how much would you need? Have you done the maths on this? I did. There are plenty of times in e.g. November when neither wind nor solar are good for much (production drops to like 1-2% of the average). That goes on for weeks. Just trying to compensate those losses for two weeks for the current amount of wind and solar Germany has, takes > 10 TWh of storage. How much thermal storage do you think would we need to build to get that?
I made those calculations to get an idea how much storage we would need to be able to finally shut down power stations running on coal or gas. I was quite shocked about the number.
Whenever someone points out the realities of things some people are quick to counter with some utopian ideas, but usually they don't do the math on it. I encourage you to always make a calculation, at least on a napkin, to get an idea of the magnitude of what would be required.
Your comment reads like it would be as easy as the flick of a wrist because something "is surprisingly effective". It's not. It takes the amount of many, many Stuttgart 21s in dedication, costs and time.
So what. Either overbuild solar and wind to a degree that even with reduced generation capacity needs can still be met and use the over-generation in summer to produce hydrogen, e-fuels for air and maritime or whatever, or run the capacity of the storage until it's depleted and use gas peakers for the 2-4 weeks in the year where nothing else can fill the demand.
Wind is usually tied across the continent and low wind in Germany usually conincides with low wind in the rest of Europe.
All your ideas hinge on storage that somehow magically comes to existence. I told you the numbers and you then argue with science fiction. No one knows how to build a reliable hydrogen network of the size that would be necessary. The efficiencies for generation are abysmal, especially if you try to generate just from water and electricity and not from natural gas. I don't believe you even remotely grasp the magnitude of the challenges ahead.
Again, I would like to encourage the use of real data and math. Less science fiction and wishful thinking.
https://www.smard.de/home/rueckkehr-von-kohlekraftwerken-an-...
To suggest that the return of those coal power plants was due to renewables underdelivering, seems to be misleading at best.
Personally, that whole fiasco served as a reminder of the dangers of fossil fuel imports from undemocratic states.
If that money was invested into nuclear power plants and not into failed Energirwende then there would be no need for that and no fear of Russian cut offs
When you look into it then Desertec would have been a huge waste of resources. The issue at this point is not generation - its storage and to a lesser degree transport.
If it's windy renewables skeptics will tell you how little power is being generated right now by solar panels.
If it's sunny renewables skeptics will tell you how little power is generated by wind turbines right now.
This is partly because skeptics are gonna skeptic but also it's also because sun and wind anticorrelate way more than most people think, reducing storage requirements down to quite reasonable levels (such that pumped storage/hydrogen can economically satisfy most grids).
You can remove your downvote now.
“The generation data for wind, rooftop and utility solar data was rescaled to supply ~60%, 25% and 20% of demand respectively over the year. For example, over the last year utility solar generation has met 5% of demand. The target for utility solar was 20%, so I rescaled the last 7 days of utility solar data by 4x (ie, 20% divided by 5%).”
"Wind and Solar are fine as long as they're only X% of the grid, but you'd need <silly amount> of storage for lulls in wind and sun once they get close to 100%" is the question it's answering.
Rescaling existing production is exactly how to demonstrate whether the peaks and lulls of solar and wind would sufficiently line up in a 100% solar/wind/pumped storage/hydrogen storage grid. Real data > hypothesized data.
What's absurd is the fossil fuel/nuclear lobby's "for public consumption" models that assume that the sun and wind both go out for 4 weeks at a time every winter and that the only way to store energy is with lithium batteries from 2012.
It rains here.
however with a 5kw array, and a 13kwh battery, we are self sufficient for at least 6 months of the year (as in 0kw from grid) and at worst 40% in the midst of winter. Today I have generated 10kwhr and its only 14:00.
Germany should have no real issues with solar production. I mean its not great, but its not anywhere near as bad as you imply.
I have always believed that putting solar panels in Germany was a wrong solution.
I have also lived in Argentina and travelled to Uruguay. Those countries have a massive amount of natural resources compared with Germany for a population that is much smaller.