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by p_l 2112 days ago
The 50% is for peak renewable usage. To keep grid stability, Germany depends a lot on French nuclear power plants, imports from elsewhere (usually not green), and ridiculously dirty lignite power plants with natural gas for load following.

And they are building more and more gas power plants and can't really decrease the amount of dirty coal (lignite fueled power plants make other coal-fired power plants look clean)
1 comments
legulere 2111 days ago
Did you actually look at the link that I posted? Those are the numbers for all of 2020.

Germany doesn’t depend on French nuclear power. Germany was a net exporter to France in many of the last years. Many neighboring countries have even higher percentage of renewables (Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway which is connected via nord.link).

Even though I would have shit down fossil fuel power plants before nuclear, Germany still manages to decrease fossil energy use in their energy mix: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energi...

link
p_l 2111 days ago
Those are average values with shortest timespan being full 24hour days. Which don't show daily slumps in production, nor issues with overproduction at times.

Germany is net exporter in general, but that's again - net. If you look, right now as I am writing this Germany is importing ~294 MW of power from France.

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imtringued 2111 days ago
> Which don't show daily slumps in production, nor issues with overproduction at times.

The atmosphere doesn't care. Less CO2 is less CO2.

>If you look, right now as I am writing this Germany is importing ~294 MW of power from France.

I think you're missing the entire point of a continental grid. The 294MW are a sign of cooperation, not of failure. If no country imports or exports energy then we could just get rid of the European grid.

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p_l 2111 days ago
What I'm complaining about is that energy transfer already runs into issues, and the weather differences might be not big enough to allow feeding a slump in wind/solar production at one end of EU with renewables from the other side.

Even with continental grid, we don't eradicate the chaotic nature of many renewable sources, which increases the strain on the system.

link