They are now looking at having to subsidize these conventional power plants in order to maintain grid stability. In particular, they want to subsidize the planned gas plants, which will all be unprofitable but which are essential to cut emissions.
And coal generation in Germany is rising, which is why the Greens are so unhappy. But they don't currently have a way out.
Yes, the utilities want to shut these down. They can't make money off of them. But the grid will not be able to be stable without many of these plants, so now Germany has passed a law and will subsidize some of these plants to keep them open.
The paradox of the Energiewende is that so far renewable capacity and generation has expanded more quickly than planned, which allows nice figures to be put out showing an ever-increasing share of renewables as a power source. But this has only been accomplished by increasing fossil fuel emissions! One can show nice graphs showing cleaner power in the official energy mix, but it is not so nice when this has been accomplished by increasing the share of total production by coal and by increasing fossil fuel emissions on net.
Btw, this does not seem like it would be different if the nuclear plants were still all up - these older coal plants are easier to convert to modulate up and down. Some of them have installed coal grinding and dust blower units, so they blow in the amount they need to handle the fluctuating power demands.
There isn't much work going ahead on any other balancing projects right now, in part due to regulatory uncertainty. The very expensive battery campaign for solar is really a German jobs program, and it's not clear that it is going to help the grid balancing problem much.
The worst of it all is that the proposal to set up the power reserve is probably going to be dominated by these coal plants!
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