Let's look instead at reality. The corrected title should read "85% of electricity generation came from renewables for a couple hours last weekend"
What's left out? The fact that the weekend included both the peak on 4/30 at mid-day... but also included less than a day earlier when solar and wind combined for (wait for it)... less than 1.7GW while gas/coal/nuclear combined for just under 20 times as much.
Aside - So the very same weekend that supposedly proved that variable renewables could reliably supply baseload demand if the turbines were spread out over large areas onshore and offshore... still couldn't demonstrate anything close to that on the (reportedly) best weekend that they've ever had. There was a 20-fold variation to deal with in a single 24-hour period.
and even came along with negative prices for several hours at the electricity exchange.
As though that were a
good thing? It's actually a sign of a serious market failure. At that same point when they were hitting the record (and prices were negative)... they were
paying Austria, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic to take 13 GWs off of their hands. This while they were also paying many mandated prices to the people generating the excess power that they couldn't even give away within Germany.
According to DW, on April 30, coal-fired power stations were only operational between 3 and 4 p.m. - and produced less than eight gigawatts of energy
This is simply false. Just a smidge under 8GW was actually the
minimum (a couple hours after the peak renewables generation).
At no time were they all shut down (let alone offline except between 3-4pm). That same variable renewables minimum coincided with 24 GWs of coal generation.
Nuclear power sources...were also severely reduced
Of course... the problem with that is that you don't save any money by curtailing a nuclear plant for a day (not exactly "severely reduced" if two of the three days that weekend had the plants running at full power - but that's picking nits). The plant staff can't go home... there's essentially zero fuel savings or operational savings. The only reason to cut production is because they would have to pay someone else to take the power.
Graichen added that days like Sunday would be "completely normal" by 2030
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&week=17&year=2017
= new reply since forum marked as read