This process has just started but needs to go much further. There are currently 1.4 million electric cars in Germany. If they charged @11KW during the day, they would draw 15.4GW, or roughly the equivalent of 3 Gravelines [1] nuclear power plants running in reverse.
However, most Germans pay the same for electricity throughout the day, so instead they charge when they arrive at home after work and Germany needs to cover 3 Gravelines worth of energy with wind, hydro, coal, and gas instead.
If consumers could charge with solar for 20 cents per kWh during the day or with brown coal for 80 cents per kWh in the evening, many would alter their usage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Stati...
I know Nordics do this already, it would be about time for the rest of Europe to follow suit.
It's always about the jobs.
The challenge on top is the replacement of coal after the exit from nuclear power. The anti-nuclear stance of many people and politicians in (West-)Germany is from the 1970s and the 1980s, especially when PershingII missles were installed in Germany. People of many other countries had no contact with nuclear weapons, stored somewhere in the wilderness. In Germany a nuclear missle facility was near to many people (I grew up next to a PershingII depot). Chernobyl didn't start the anti-nuclear stance but later accelerated it. So decades later Germany got out of nuclear energy.
Which now poses the problem of getting out of coal.
Solar when the sun is shining, windmills when the wind is blowing, batteries, hydro, and maybe 1 backup nat. gas plant when somehow all of that is out and you need to ramp up.
Looks like some more wind and a lot of batteries is what's left.
And solar is predictable per day good enough that you can compensate the short intervals with gas and batteries.
The current leaders in the Netherlands also want to start projects for new nuclear power plants. The Netherlands is also over producing apparently. Surely, they also should be investing in massive battery plants instead of new nuclear reactors.
Imagine the maintenance costs of protecting the nuclear reactors when the global warming flooding starts in these low lands.
There's no replacement for a nuclear plant yet for this purpose until a very large breakthrough is made. The only realistic large scale storage at this level is a dam and since the tech is old, most places in the developed world where one can be built has one already.
In summer they have plenty of energy that they don't know what to do with it and in winter they depend on France to not burn too much coal just to keep the lights on despite not even transitioning heating yet.