"So yes, Germany has a lot of gas-fired plants, and a lot of coal-fired plants, but they are actually used very little - only when demand (including from France) is very high and renewables supply is very low - which does happen, but not that often anymore."
This will continue to happen for the foreseeable future during the winter months. Solar is almost neglible, and wind obviously has slumps.
To fix this problem, the article brings up the recurring theme of saviour technologies that simply are not there yet: "flexible generation, whether hydro, new forms of storage"
Total consumption for 2021 in Germany: ~500TWhs [1]. That means ~10TWhs per week. At the moment our storage capacity is in the small GWhs ballpark [2]. We would have to increase this thousandfold. I haven't seen this gap adressed with actual projects yet.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/164149/umfrag...
[2] https://www.erneuerbareenergien.de/transformation/speicher/w...