On the contrary, California is struggling with with electricity generation during times of high A/C loads due to a heat wave. Those times correspond with high solar power generation, without solar they'd be doing a lot worse.
On the contrary, Germany has met their goal of 80% full natgas storage several weeks early despite the French nuclear reactors being offline due to higher than expected renewable energy supplies.
You're saying that Germany and California are not struggling with the electric grid...now I believe you're trolling
They invested a lot in solar power, which is expensive, so they couldn't afford to invest enough in transmission and backup generators, and now they have expensive electricity and unreliable grids. Ignoring current year, I think Germany is second in the world in regards to expensive electricity (after Denmark) and California is one of the most expensive states in the US.
They invested a lot in solar power because it is cheap. It is the cheapest method of generating power every fielded. They got far more power by investing in solar than they would have spending anywhere else.
Of course they have not finished building out, which takes time. And, Germany counted on access to NG as backup while they build out. The war interfered. Had they invested any other way they would be even worse off.
> invested a lot in solar power because it is cheap
This is an outright lie, let me dig in a bit. They're cheap only if you look at watts generated, if you ignore extra grid costs and backup supply. For 1 MW of solar, you need 1 MW of backup. If you use solar for most of the day and use the backup just for 20% of the total electricity required, then the backup plant will look like it's very expensive to build and operate, while the solar seems cheap. But solar cannot operate without backup.
What needs to happen is that you have to transfer some of the money generated by the solar plant to the backup plant. How you do that will make it look like solar is either very cheap, or expensive - and this is all political and a PR move. In the end, consumer will pay for both anyway, which is why Germany and California have such high electricity bills.
A real life equivalent example would be to say that your truck can downhill with 100 MPG and very cheap to run, and this is absolutely true...if you ignore that the truck must also climb the hill.
> Had they invested any other way they would be even worse off
Germany is lucky that EU just implemented the unified energy market, otherwise they would have been absolutely obliterated this past winter + wartime.
On the contrary, Germany has met their goal of 80% full natgas storage several weeks early despite the French nuclear reactors being offline due to higher than expected renewable energy supplies.