Then they're lying to you. Unless you're on a completely separate power grid, your energy is, in reality, provided by the power source closest to you. It might be solar or wind sometimes, but the rest of the time it's probably a non-renewable source.
German companies claiming to get their energy through renewable sources are primarily buying credits from Norway and a few other sources in Europe.
You can stick your head in the ground and pretend all of the electricity you use is being generated by renewable resources, but as long as plants in Germany are producing power using coal and natural gas, it means you're using that energy.
This is not true. There are multiple energy providers selling only renewables. There even is one village that managed to do so on its own for itself.
Your argumentation is wrong. What you say is: There is no use in limiting pollution, because there will still be some pollution left anyways. I bet you never clean your place, because it will get dirty soon after.
It's a solved problem for Germany. Electrolyze Hydrogen, store it in the existing gas infrastructure for the winter. Use the gas plants to burn it in the winter.
That has a round trip efficiency of around 20-25 % I think (more if you can also use the process heat), so we would need to over-provision renewables by 400 % to make it work.
There is a ton of unused roof space that could be decked out with solar, though. There are few heat pumps deployed so far, lots of inefficient old houses that could be modernized, plus there is an array of concepts for other storage tech still at a pretty early stage. It's probably going to be a mix of different generation and storage tech coupled with gains in efficiency, and that seems like it could work out.
Sure, feasible in the long run but don't hold your breath on it to work in the next 5-10 years. China has just doubled their growth targets for solar so producers have trouble keeping up with demand already and we have almost no domestic production anymore, so there's just no way we'll be able to act on this in the near future.
We don't Electrolyse Hydrogen in Germany there is not one large-scale installation. You can't pump 100% hydrogen in the natural gas infrastructure, and the gas plants need to support hydrogen burning.
You also need a surplus of energy, which Germany obviously not has.
Indeed. If the annual natural gas use of all of Germany was represented as liquid hydrogen, it would be a ~700m cube.
A year is probably more than is needed, but I don't know how low storage can go before it causes problems. If I guess a week is sufficient then every million German residents need a 43m cube.
This isn't unbuildable if there is sufficient political will.
What this boils down to is "salt is a couple orders of magnitude more dense than air, so we can fit a lot of air in very little salt". Which is a sentiment I think most people can feel is correct even if they don't know their ideal gas law or whatever.
Imagine this:
Picard goes to the holobridge.
Computer, give me flight controls in the style of the enterprise-D
Computer … … …
Picard: Ah, right at home!
Reminds me of Lt. Barclay, when he was "infected" by the alien probe. He found the existing computer interfaces inefficient so he went to the holodeck to create more efficient ones.
"Tie both consoles into the Enterprise main computer core utilizing neural-scan interface."
"There is no such device on file. "
"No problem, here's how you build it. "
