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Of course it is!

Very informative come back. Care to show electricity sales from a Spanish company to Germany or Poland? Take a look at this article. Do you see Spain anywhere on that graphic? Electricity is imported from neighbouring countries.

Should I have made explicitely clear that those effects are countered by grid operators?

That is my point exactly. Grid operators are having trouble countering those effects when they are dealing with large numbers of fluctuating local grids. The power on the main grid must fluctuate from the load by only a few percentage points. When drawing power from a number of communal grids that fluctuate more than thet is is very difficult to keep the grid power smooth.

For every surplus watt comming from the sun or wind the grid operators pump water uphill. For every down shift in solar production water is going downhill. Grid regulations happen more or less instantly, except super sensible equipment no one notices anything.

I also think you may be misunderstanding me in what I mean by fluctuations. Solar and wind generation can change by several percentage points minute to minute. If enough plants are at low output and then go to high output the power can fluctuate significantly, may by 10%. Surges like this can cause the grid to overload and shut down.

Ten, fivteen years ago, grid operation was done on a more central level. Now with decentralizations regulation means are also decentralized.

Care to cite that change? The grid is one central connection and needs to be controlled centrally. One can think of it as a closed irrigation system where the only control one has is how much water goes into the system. If the pressure fluctuates by more then a few percentages the system shuts down to protect itself. If one has too many variable inputs then it is very difficult to keep that margin of error.

The movement will always be in the right speed. It is not like that you simply can connect a plant to the grid and thats it.

That is exactly what they are doing right now. The grid can handle some fluctuations but there is a point that these fluctuation will overload the grid. Do you really want to find that point by experimenting with people's electricity?

Import capacity from France is just 2500MW, so even if they tried, the French couldn't sell enough power to make up for the output of even just two of Germany's nuclear power plants.

http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/transfercapacities.html

Note that the import capacity from France is just 2500MW, less than two typical nuclear power plants can produce. While "they'll just buy from the French" is an easy conclusion to jump to, it cannot be supported with numbers. The transfer capacity simply doesn't exist.

http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/transfercapacities.html

That says that Germany expots a net of 13 TWh a year. Generation is 636 TWh. so Germany exports about 2% of its production.

I see nothing that says Germany has 35% overcapacity at that link.

I do see a page that says that Germany has about 10% overcapacity, which is reasonable, and that when the nukes are shut down there will be around 20% undercapacity which would be a disaster.

http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/generation/germanysignificantnewbuildneeded.html

More like 35% in 3007, but essentially correct. Data from RWE: http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/germanyimportandexportofelectricity.html

I just want to add that even with 13 of its nuclear 17 reactors shut down last week-end because of repairs and other reasons, the agency responsible for the electricity network announced that Germany was not importing electricity from abroad. So the GP is full of shit.

Oh, and here's a source for your overcapacity claim, in case somebody asks: http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/germanyimportandexportofelectricity.html

A source for the 35% figure from RWE, 2007: http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/germanyimportandexportofelectricity.html

I'm not a big fan of subsidies per se, but in this case they helped kickstart an economy and we're now reaping the benefits. BTW, they are about to sunset (e.g. this year is the last you can get funding for home solar installations), but after Fukushima some are talking about extending them.

Germany has been getting rid of nuclear power for some time now, but guess what? They don't have anything to replace it, and so they buy it instead from France - which generates it using *drumroll* nuclear power plants. Talk about NIMBY.

Germany is an electricity exporter. We generate 35% more power than we consume.

http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/germanyimportandexportofelectricity.html