3. For the purposes of paragraph 1(a), gross final consumption of electricity from renewable energy sources shall be calculated as the quantity of electricity produced in a Member State from renewable energy sources, excluding the production of electricity in pumped storage units from water that has previously been pumped uphill.
I'm aware of this, renewable production is always given priority so renewable production == consumption indeed, but all of it is used somewhere. There are periods of negative electricity prices in stormy or very sunny periods, and these will likely be more frequent in the future if wind/solar production grows, but they incentive businesses to try to use (or store) this kind of excess energy. If there is far too much production, then big producers (solar/wind parks) are turned off, which does no harm.
So this doesn't contradict the graph I linked. It affects, however, the profitability of the operators of fossil fuel plants.
"hydro battery".
No need to put that in "", it's a PSH or pumped storage hydro we've constructed since the sixties.
I didn't refer only to pump storage hydro, thus the ""
. Traditional hydro dams without pumps, which are often bigger than PSHs, are part of this "battery", because they are flexible (with some limitations, obviously, e.g. because of seasonal) and can increase and decrease production according to the missing solar/wind power.
And no, it's not going to happen because engineers don't shout as loud as econazis, I've already
said it before:
I'm aware of this problem too, it also applies to wind parks, but I don't see it as a "blocker". In the latter case, resistance in some case disappeared when the inhabitants of the surroundings were offered participation of the profits or even to organize the parks themselves (community wind farms). This could also be done with pump storage.
Always take into account that central Europe is an extremely densely populated place of the world, and it's one of the worst places to generate renewable electricity. Even in France, Spain or Poland the potential in relation to the population/demand is much higher than in Germany or Belgium. And of course the more people live near potential production areas the more resistance is to be expected.
Even taking this into account, in Germany in only 20 years, renewables generation skyrocketed from 5% to 40% of electricity consumption, and regarding
production it was even >50% in 2020 (excesses were sold to neighbouring countries, so the difference between "consumption" and "production" percentage isn't really high).
See also
this list (the "champion" among bigger countries may be Brazil: ~80% of electricity coming from renewables, above all hydro). China, which is or will be eventually the world's biggest energy consumer, is also investing lots of money in renewables.
Everyone puts solar panels for free, generates extra energy during the day for credits while there is more energy than needed so it gets thrown away],
Electricity can't be "thrown away" that easily. Somebody is using it always. Bitcoin miners are an example how excess electricity can be used. If electricity prices become negative then it becomes profitable to store it in less efficient ways (e.g. hydrogen, methane, e-fuels), but that's still ok as energy consumption is almost never problematic for the environment, (fossil) energy production is.
And since fossil fuel plants have to also run during the day but at a loss, guess what happens?
That depends of the type of plants, you're right in that coal (and nuclear) plants aren't flexible, but gas plants are. Even coal plants can be regulated to a certain extent, so at least they haven't to run around midday.
What seems to be true in California according to what I read is that many households with solar panels do not contribute that much to fixed costs like grid maintenance, and they're often wealthier households. That's however a problem of the price model, the electricity companies could also charge higher fixed monthly fees for these costs (which is discussed according to media).
