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Germany's coal exit quietly progressing, likely completed by 2032 – researcher
(www.cleanenergywire.org)
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Last year there were 78GW of battery grid connections approved in Germany. That is with 720GW pending for approval. So safe to say that segment is growing quickly. Add to that trade with other countries. Europe is large enough, that the weather is very different across the continent.
Oh and also, there always is some wind at least. The worse week last year was at 12.8% of electricity consumption from wind and average is 28%. That week also had pretty good solar.
Shouldn't that be GWh? Anyway, that's peanuts if you want to rely purely on renewables. You also can't look at average wind, you have to cover energy demand all the time. If there is no wind for minutes in such case, you have big problems.
No, grid connections are measured in GW.
These batteries usually are planned to have two hours of storage. Some more some less. So 158GWh would be enough to power Germany through sunny, but windless days. 1440GWh are more then a days worth of electricity consumption of Germany. Again there are no days with absolutely no wind and solar and Germany needs more of them to even charge those batteries up anyway. So it is on the lower end of what is needed to run a country like Germany without fossil fuels.
At that point you can talk about some weird forms of storage like hydrogen or use a bit of biomass or something like that. You might even get away with carbon capture and storage, because the amount of fossil fuels needed for that grid are so low.
I think you need more than one day of energy's worth, plus there is a problem with short and cloudy winter days where you'd struggle to generate enough energy let alone store it. I'd be really curious if there are some actual studies that observe past years and calculate all this.