I am under no “illusion” that prematurely phasing out a large percentage of a nations power generation , will reduce the amount of power generation available…
And to forestall the "No, I believe that Germany's failure was to not build enough renewables" reply...
It's my understanding that even if one were to direct the entire world's energy storage production capacity solely to producing energy storage for the nation of Germany, it would be insufficient to produce enough energy storage to meet the needs of Germany's energy requirements, given any even vaguely-plausible buildout of "renewable" power generation facilities.
Germany doesn't have enough of the geology and geography required to have much "always on" "renewable" power, so it MUST primarily rely on intermittent sources... which means that they in order to make up the shortfalls, they need to have enough storage (which I understand to be currently impossible), reliable rampable power (like nuclear or petrochemical), or some combination of the two. There's just no real alternative.
Well, I guess there IS something of an alternative. Industry that requires reasonably-priced electricity can flee the country, reducing Germany's overall energy requirements. (Though, surely nowhere near enough to make much of a dent in the electricity costs.)
Today's global battery production capacity is something like 2.6 TWh/year.
Germany uses an average of 58 GW of electricity (averaged over a year). So this capacity would be enough to store 45 hours of their electricity use.
This would not, by itself, be enough to level Germany's demand. But using batteries alone would be foolish. They are not suited for long term storage. The better solution would be electrolysis to make hydrogen to complement the batteries. In that case, this amount of batteries would be more than enough to get to 100% renewables for their grid. Germany has huge salt formations that can store hydrogen extremely cheaply. Electrolyser production would have had to have been stepped up, I will admit.
But 100% is overkill, since even sticking with their existing nuclear plants would not have gotten them off fossil fuels -- nowhere close. Nor would any plausible nuclear buildout. Judging by how that went elsewhere in Europe it would have been an utter fiasco. The alternative to compare against would have been a continued buildout of renewables at a higher rate. Fossil fuels would still have been used, but at a lower rate, and the shock from Russia would have been proportionally less.
> This would not, by itself, be enough to level Germany's demand.
This is exactly what I said. There's not enough industrial-grade energy storage capacity in the world to even out the intermittency of "renewable" energy. You currently must supplement it with "always on" power generation.
> The better solution would be electrolysis to make hydrogen...
> Today, 95% of the hydrogen produced in the United States is made by natural gas reforming in large central plants.
While it is true that we can work with hydrogen and can burn it for power, hydrogen will not save us. It's notoriously difficult to contain, meaning that it leaks out of containers and piping at the drop of a hat. It is the second least dense known substance in the universe, meaning that its energy density per cubic meter is dreadfully low. It's also energy-intensive to produce and store. The way all industrial-scale hydrogen production works means that the process to produce hydrogen produces more CO2 than if we just burned the petrochemicals used to feed the process. [0][1]
The energy consumption of electrolysis doesn't matter at all if we have more electricity available than we know what to do with... but that's very definitely not the world we live in right now.
> ...even sticking with their existing nuclear plants would not have gotten them off fossil fuels...
Right. The thing to do is to build more fission plants and "renewable" generators in tandem. Fission plants are ultimately a stopgap until we have enough storage and solar/wind/hydro/etc. to meet our current and future energy demands. But, like, even if we start honestly and eagerly working on this in earnest... today, we're absolutely not going to get there globally within our lifetimes. We're sure as hell never going to get there if we shut down existing fission plants and backfill by burning coal and natural gas.
[0] Search this <https://www.aiche-cep.com/cepmagazine/march_2021/MobilePaged...> for the phrase "Natural gas is currently the main feedstock for hydrogen processes, accounting for 75% of annual global production", and read the next couple of paragraphs.
