this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Germany is currently planning to add 25 GW of new gas plants for electricity generation to enable the coal exit and still have capacities for bad renewable days. Gas consumption for electricity generation will increase immensely. Especially when thinking about the topics you mentioned regarding other gas usage that is going to get replaced by more electricity usage.
Just look at bad renewable days with not much wind or sun, e.g. week #4 this year: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&week=04 (Lemmy is breaking the link, just click on the right side on week #4 to change the display)
Both coal types together run at about 30 GW on such days, with gas adding another ~12 GW to the fossil load. Even with adding more renewables over the next years, there needs to be a solution for bad renewable days - which will be the new gas plants. The plants are still in an early funding stage so this will take years to get them up an running. But time is ticking when looking at the early coal phase-out date.
Every country just needs something they can turn on when there are bad renewable days. And as you are saying, for many other EU countries that is already natural gas. So it will stay on the menu for decades, as it also works great together with daily load balance and renewables. Flame on - flame off, most flexible plants.
Thats what the 25GW of natural gas power plants for Germany turned into. 4.4GW of hdrogen power plants, another 4.4GW of mixed hydrogen and natural gas power plants and up to 15GW of natural gas power plants, which have to be ocnverted to hyrogen by 2035.. There is also the problem of some coal power plants mainly lignite being baseload. This means they run even when renewables are available. So there is no need to replace all coal electricity with gas. Even more to the point, battery storage is growing relativly well in Germany, which should reduce gas consumption, when only short periods need to be covered, which is very common. All in all German gas consumption might increase, but with some trade and so forth, it might also just stay stable.
But I would strongly recommend, that you look at Spain and Italy. Both operate gas power plants even during sun hours of sunny days. So a bit more solar and that is going to reduce consumption by a lot. Propably more then Germany running full power gas power plants for a few weeks each year.