If you want to "understand exactly how it works", then you need to build a realistic digital twin of the whole grid, and run tons of scenarios.
Trying to conclude from such "high level" map is as ridiculous as trying to explain car mobility in a city by just looking at one unique number for each country.
When you do that, you realize several things:
- the electricity grid _before the move to go out of the nuclear_ was not sustainable: reducing emission implied electrifying, which implies local flexibility that the grid at the time was simply not able to provide. The "old" nuclear plants had to disappear in the mid-/long-term, and because of that, there were several possibilities. Idiots are assuming that if Germany would not have got out of nuclear, the situation would be perfect today, which is just plain stupid (the situation would be closer to the French one: everything looking fine on the surface, but heading right for the wall).
- the "no wind night" challenge is technically as "easy" as the technical challenge of developing a grid with nuclear plant. It's difficult to understand for the laymen, but the "old" nuclear plants were technically not to the level for a grid without gas and coal, and need to be replaced by new ones which will need to solve a lot of problems that are similar to the "no wind night" challenge. In simulation, it turns out that large distance grid connectivity (which is better for the resilience anyway) and some storage (which was at the time (and still today) way more room to progress than some nuclear technology) are fixing the "no wind night" challenge quite effectively. It may seem surprising, but in science, the conclusions of computations are way more reliable than the gut-feeling of laymen.
I understand it is frustrating to see that your naive understanding is contradicted by conclusions from proper studies, and it is very easy to just conclude "I'm smarter, I know it will not work, the only explanation is that it was ideology".
(not sure I get your point when you bring Nikolas Stihl: isn't this guy as much as an expert on grid simulation than you? Being an industry leader does not magically give them a pass on doing exactly the same mistake as you, which is: drawing naive conclusions from naive understandings and concluding that if experts have a different ones, the only explanation is that they are "ideological")
> What were the evil forces that sabotaged this very well thought through idea?
There are tons of ways to fail. Seeing something not working perfectly and concluding that the project itself was therefore stupid is just incorrect. And we should also keep in mind that the risk of failures was, at the time, according to science, as big if they would have gone in the "nuclear direction". Sometimes you may take the most rational decisions and it still does not work out.
> What have you done?
I really hope this is not one of those stupid argumentation panic "oh yeah? oh yeah? well, you seem to know better than me and have pointed out the stupid things I say, but how many push-ups are you able to do?" (but don't worry, I've done _a lot_).