Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

Gas/Hydrogen are Germany's answer to you last point.

You can store energy created by renewables this way easily and use it when needed. Right now we can't produce enough hydrogen though, so gas can be used in the meantime, but in the future the entire infrastructure, such as power plants, pipelines or port terminals can be switched to hydrogen: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/HydrogenCor... You could even produce the hydrogen needed cheaply in countries with better conditions for solar and then ship it the same way we currently do with gas. Hydrogen power plants also have the advantage to quickly change output volumes, which is needed when most energy is produced by solar/wind.

Ideally German's investment into nuclear fusion pays off though as it would change the whole game. https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-fusion-germany-bets-billions-o...

Excess capacity (literally free power) is only a problem because we mandate that electricity generation can only be done as a business that has to earn profit margins.

Because of economics, this means it makes sense as a business to sell power that requires a purchased input commodity, and doesn't make as much sense as a business to build enough solar to sell power during darker months. This is absurd, backwards, and is hampering our ability to deploy clean and affordable power.

National Governments should be massively overbuilding solar and just handing out the resulting power. It's really difficult to mismanage a solar farm.

Maybe instead of a deregulated generation market, we should focus on a barely regulated power storage market.

> If I need steady state gigawatt scale power in a specific location, Nuclear is the only green option.

I don't believe that is true: one way to produce electricity is a thermal engine driving a generator, but for a thermal engine you need both a cold heat bath and a hot heat bath.

Those 2 heat baths could be externally delivered (a stream of ice, and a stream of steam, say) or one of the 2 heat baths could be chosen as the local environmental temperature heat bath.

Historically the local environmental temperature heat bath was selected for the role of the cold heat bath, and the hot heat bath was heated by say burning fuel (fossil or nuclear; and I am ignoring the chemical and mechanical energy terms of internal combustion engines).

If you could source a cold heat bath, one could select the local environments as the hot side heat bath instead.

Above the tropopause the atmosphere has become a lot more transparent for thermal infrared radiation, and thats why it is a lot colder up there, its in better thermal radiation contact with the CMB (the temperature of dark space), very close to the absolute zero point for temperature.

It is not a scientific challenge but a "mere" engineering one, to create a robust, all-weather aerostat where the "cable" transports mass (presumably, but necessarily a refrigerant) symmetrically up and down (in a loop) heating the upper layers of the atmosphere (puncturing the CO2 blanket), while cooling ground level environment. That large temperature difference persists day and night, winter and summer. So it is a form of green baseload energy generation, which helps cool the planet, and runs 24/7 reducing dependence on oil countries or places like Russia for nuclear fuel.

Depending on north/south lattitude, the height of the tropopause differs a bit.

You wouldn't want to risk such a contraption (some lightweight ~12km vertical zeppelin housing the up and down paths) falling on populated areas, but luckily 90% of the world population lives close to a coastline, so just anchor it further away from the cost than it is tall, if it falls over, at least it can't reach populated areas on land. Another upshot of coastal chimneys is that the sea is a very heavy thermal mass, so you won't run out of thermal energy that fast, the cold mass flow that comes down can be used to freeze water, desalinating it. During a transition period where conventional fossil / nuclear power plants still exist such ice or ice slurry could be pipelined to the "cold" thermal baths of such power plants, greatly improving the electric yield for the same amount of fossil / nuclear fuel.

There is just embarrassingly little research in this direction, to solve such an engineering challenge.

> So they would use the excessive power generated by wind+solar into producing H2 from water and then transport it? Theoretically it can work, but as you mentioned, can they produce enough hydrogen to match the demand via wind+solar?

I think it can work, especially as you can easily import it using existing gas infrastructure and pipelines as a lot of that infrastructure is build to be converted in the future or currently upgraded for it.

> Nuclear fusion would absolutely be a game changer. But they it could take 5, 10 or even 50 more years to achieve that and by that time I don't know if German economy would be able to keep on pumping billions into research.

Building a nuclear reactor would probably might as well take just as long and we need quicker changes — especially when it comes down shutting down our coal power plants.

I believe that the money a nuclear reactor would cost to build is better invested in renewables (together with gas/hydrogen) and nuclear fusion. Is this strategy the right move? Only time will tell, but I'm optimistic.

That's fantasy. Germany tried very hard to civilize russia through trade over few past decades. Everybody tried. Turned out russia is just to stupid for any kind of advancement. Did not learn a thing. Everybody else did though.