Current German energy policy can be reduced to a sentence: if you can make it simple, make it difficult instead. A good image is a bicycle, in which round wheels are replaced by elliptic wheels. This will make the bike move up and down like a roller coaster. In order to compensate for this, a sophisticated system of sensors and shock-absorbers is built, run by a digital management system, in order to keep the bike always at the same height.
The German energy system can be compared with this bicycle, with intermittent sources of energy (wind, solar) playing the role of the elliptic wheels, with the complication that in real life, the ellipse is replaced by a curve whose angle changes every minute.
From a demand-driven system, Germany has shifted to a supply-driven system, in which at every time of the year, it produces too much or too little energy, so that it must manage and compensate for power fluctuations every day around the clock.
When intermittent sources do not produce enough, conventional power plants (gas, coal and hydro) which are kept on stand-by at high costs, put energy into the grid. When intermittent sources produce too much electricity, Germany begs its neighbours to take the surplus, and pays them for that (negative prices).
A few examples of how this distorted system works. Based on peak electricity price, a good proxy, albeit not identical to peak demand, a price of € 583.40 per MWh was reached at 5-6 p.m. on January 20, 2025, according to the Bundesnetzagentur. This was during a phase of very low wind and solar generation; residual load was 66.0 GWh over the course of the hour, one of the quarter’s highest figures, meaning conventional plants and imports covered nearly all of it.