Coal power is about economics, not energy. Germany could easily cover its energy demands. In a wurst case scenario (german pun intended), France and Hungary are able and willing to sell nuclear power.
I think a big thing is the demand of having 100% uptime of the grid for everyone.
If there was a list where you could sign up and get paid for having something like an hour of notice until a power cut of one or two hours I think it would be doable to be less perfectionist about this requirement and actually save a lot of peak demand resources and dirty back-up plants.
That would be impossible to get through. Currently we’re trying to get downtime to below 5 minutes per year for the average German (it’s at 17 minutes per year currently). That’s 4 nines of reliability, with a move to 5 nines. For every citizen. Many people will not even see any interruption for many years.
This means that Google will be more often down for you than your power.
Going from that standard to the constant failures you suggest would be impossible.
