“German transmission system operator Tennet recently announced an 80% increase in its transmission fees because of the high construction costs of new power lines to accommodate renewable energy. By 2025 costs of the Energiewende could exceed €25,000 ($27,500 U.S. dollars) for an average four-person household.”

Sure, natural gas plants could replace some nuclear power — but natural gas is a finite fossil fuel.

More combined heat and power plants could be built, but they are already half of Europe’s renewable power is wood, the fuel of pre-industrial societies, and wood and other biomass can easily be harvested beyond sustainability.

That leaves solar power, but Germany’s southern states only have 955 full-load hours of irradiation per year in Bavaria.  Nor do they have wind power.  Even in the past there were no windmills weren’t built because there wasn’t even enough wind to grind grain.

Utility-scale energy storage isn’t a fix, because there aren’t enough battery banks, nor are hydroelectric pumped storage plants possible because they’re unprofitable.

Therefore, cross-country transmission from large-scale photo-voltaic and wind farms throughout the rest of Germany is essential. But installations in north and eastern regions are already maxing out on power generation, often generating excessive amounts of electricity simultaneously, which makes the grid unstable and can result in a blackout without without expensive grid intervention measures.

On top of that, it’s hard to build overhead power lines – no one wants them in their back yard.  So Plan “B is to lay 1,000 km (620 miles) of underground long-distance cables, which are 3 to 8 billion euros more than overhead lines, and likely to cost even more than that in the future; experts have estimated costs will be 55.3 billion euros by 2025.  And their lifespan is only 20 years, versus 40 years for overhead lines.

Already the lack of transmission has led to 4.1 TWh of wind energy undelivered because of grid congestion due to lack of transmission lines in 2015.

That leaves demand reduction, more energy-efficient products, and borrowing surplus electricity from nearby countries.

But by far the most likely savior is coal.  Though even that is a temporary fix since coal production has peaked in many countries and likely to peak world-wide by 2030.  The coal that would power Germany is the worst coal — lignite — which has so little energy it’s like burning wood (anthracite has the most energy density, followed by bituminous and semi-bituminous coal).

The Czech Republic has recently enhanced its power export potential. After an advanced 660 MW coal power plant at Ledvice was proposed without enough lignite available for long-term operation [my emphasis], the mining limits were lifted by parliamentary resolution. An additional 100 million metric tons of lignite can now be excavated, allowing power generation at Ledvice to at least mid-century.  And there are other lignite plants as well.

Austria may come to the rescue, somewhat, with their hydroelectric storage ability to store excess power from Germany and send it back when it’s needed.

Jeffrey Michel concludes his article with:
When nuclear phase-out in Germany is culminated at the end of 2022, annual power generation will have been reduced by an additional 90 TWh. It is hoped that Germany will ultimately have a wide variety of domestic and international options at its disposal. Its grid architecture would likely be aligned toward achieving predictable revenues, and will include a profusion of underground cables. But Germany may also have to be saved by the flexibility and resourcefulness of the Central European electrical power industry, based mainly on coal power. Whatever the final outcome, the obsolescence of many original blueprints for the Energiewende is already apparent.