If you double-down on renewables, then you double-down on natural gas. Germany decided to close down their nuclear and coal generation, so the only thing that is left is natural gas for base load (and to augment renewable intermittency problems).
The idea that it's nuclear or fossil for baseload is a false dichotomy, that ingores the dozens of intermediary storage solutions.
Solar is currently the cheapest source of energy with a margin. Add storage to an overproduction system, and it's still cheaper.
The german failure to finish the "energiewende" is a political one, driven by corrupt conservative politicians and the privatized energy sector, to press as much return out of their old investments as possible.
Solar and wind are not just intermittent on a day to day basis, they are intermittent on a seasonal one -- as we saw last year the wind can not blow as strong for months at a time. Much of Europe could be blanketed with a large weather system for days cutting the sun and so forth.
Even flow batteries simply can't store enough energy, hydro storage is limited by geography and other solutions are currently niche and have yet to prove scale up. Green hydrogen probably has the most promise as a large scale storage technology that's close enough to natural gas to make workable.
Energy is so critical to our civilizations that you can't just make assertions that it'll be OK, you need to be certain. Getting it wrong can be terminal.
And that is one of the reasons that the most recent election led to the elevation of the Green Party.
Good to clear up confusion. I mean batteries in the general sense, not just based on chemistry.
>But, in general, they are technically sound and can be scaled up with sufficient investment and demand.
So far that hasn't been shown to be true. This is very much an open question, leaning towards 'no' because NOBODY got that level of storage working.
And how cost effective are those storage methods?
Compared to current gas prices or nuclear, batteries are dirt cheap and some of the others are almost as cheap as batteries.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/07/f65/Storage%... (figures 5.5 and 5.6)
LFP storage batteries use only widely available minerals: Lithium, Iron and Phosphorus. No nickel, cobalt etc.
I'd be very happy with renewables+batteries, but the fact it's so quiet suggests to me this isn't so simple. Certainly in Northern Europe where dark, windless winters exist - i.e. you need storage potentially for weeks, not a small few hours.
None of those are actual options. Pumped hydro is pretty much the only viable option but you need the geography for it. Germany does not have the geography to roll out pumped hydro at enough of a scale to bridge the intermittency issues with renewables.
But don't believe me, look at the present reality - there is no nation on earth that is able to power it's economy with renewables (+batteries). The only viable option is hydro-electric and unfortunately, we've pretty much ran out of places to dam.
>Solar is currently the cheapest source of energy with a margin.
Again, there is no battery technology that is able to store enough excess energy to power a modern economy (or even a mid-size city).
>The german failure to finish the "energiewende" is a political one
The sad part is that it isn't. Material science is hard and you can't just will non-existent technology into existence ... as the Germans found out. That's why Germany was signing multi-billion/multi-decade deals with Russia to import their natural gas.
Still blows my mind that Germany and other countries are closing nuclear facilities though.
That's kind of a misconception. Germany isn't (and wasn't) closing any nuclear plants that weren't about to closed anyways - it was all old plants.
What Germany did was not bringing online new ones and instead choosing to invest that money elsewhere.
Germany is shutting down pretty nice later gen plants commissioned in 1989. The US is still operating much older designs commissioned in 1969 (20 years older).
What blows my mind is that by using nuclear power and creating nuclear waste for a few decades, society created a problem that coming generations have to take care of for millenia.
Total production that has been shutdown (baseload power) is around 19,689MW now post fukushima.
They've been able to replace maybe 4MW's with solar at this point? It's kind of mind boggling how much was shut down - the problem this has caused for electrification in germany is significant as now german electric prices are actually very high not low.
Annual contracts for electricity are running 46 cents / kwH which is CRAZY if you want to electrify your country.
France which is right next door, has much more annoying labor laws / high cost of labor is perhaps half that price.
Germany has 5.3 GW of installed solar, how can you be off by a factor of 1200?
They produced 51Twh/365/24 = 5.8GW in avg delivery.
Nuclear generated it's power around the clock. I'm not sure solar is covering the evening peaks and the prices for electricity make going to things like heat pumps and electric dryers much more expensive than you'd expect in germany so the economic case for electrification in germany has started to run way way behind the case in other places that have kept nuclear in the mix.
What else is there?
That should be a clue that there are some major (and insurmountable) issues with deploying batteries at grid-scale. It's sad this is a game that is being played on the public, where the public is made to believe wind/solar investment leads to less reliance on fossil fuels.
The world needs to be rid of oil, there are few other things that have caused as much human and environment suffering as oil. Hell, I even back bio fuels, as bad as they are, as long we can conclusively show they have a major impact in oil use and aren't just a subsidy handout farmers.
The plants don't need to be in non-nato countries, they need to be in NATO countries and help eliminate the need for oil.
... and are not viable without baseload provided by fossil fuels. Unfortunately there is such a thing as cloudy days, night time, and days without wind.