http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,810370,00.html
Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels received more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but contributed only three percent of the country's total energy supply. The future of renewable energy is a major issue in Germany, where the government announced earlier this year that it would be phasing out its nuclear energy program.
Under Germany's renewable energy law, each new energy system qualifies for 20 years of subsidies. A flood of new solar farm operators and private users have pushed up the costs of those subsidies, opponents argue, passing the costs of the government support on to all electricity consumers nationwide.
It's hard to see how this would cause a problem with coal right now, especially since demand on many coal plants has risen after the nuclear shutdowns, and since more shutdowns are impending.
Solar in much of Germany isn't all that productive. I can see how the need to ramp coal plants down when solar feed-in rises at peaks could make coal plants less productive and thus raise taxes -they are not designed to do that. But in the long run it will be the consumer who must pay the cost, because Germany is way behind in their energy program and they have a difficult situation. So they can't get rid of the coal plants. And in the long run, you have to pay to keep those resources operating. Still, since solar is generally more easily predicted, I suspect most of the issue comes from northern wind.
I found an article explaining some of the situation with the eastern grid:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,14933985,00.html
The short summary is that they are maintaining grid stability by shoving it over the border, even though the power is needed in the south. It's a very frustrating situation.
Germany hasn't tied in the North Sea projects yet, they don't seem to be making progress on the north-south lines, the Poles and the Czechs are threatening to block the electricity surges at the border with special transformers, and so it goes.
Until the Germans get their asses in gear, they are going to have an increasingly unstable situation. They do have a plan, but they aren't executing it, and if they dawdle too much longer the funding for those North Sea projects is going to evaporate.
The additional NG plants aren't going up yet as far as I can find out, which means that in practice in the winter they have to use the older coal plants. The feed-in tariffs for solar power have to be paid, plus the increased cost on the compensating power had to be paid, and in the end it WILL be paid.
A lot of this is fighting over rates and money. BNetzA's monitoring report covers some of the delays and problems:
http://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BNetzA/PressSection/ReportsPublications/2011/MonitoringReportSummaryElectricity2011.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
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