This is somewhat misleading - there is a Europe-wide energy grid, Germany has many neighbors, and a lot of power has been flowing across borders even before thi

This is somewhat misleading - there is a Europe-wide energy grid, Germany has many neighbors, and a lot of power has been flowing across borders even before this project started. It doesn't make sense to look at Germany in isolation. While I agree that the German approach is misguided (should have shut down coal first, not nuclear) I don't think it's as problematic as you make it seem - the spikes in wind average out excellently when you look on the scale of several countries, and daytime demand for solar power is large and growing due to industrial use (residential use peaks in the evenings, but residential use is insignificant compared to industry). A significant component of the Energiewende is replacing baseload fossils (coal) with peaker gas plants but the coal industry is very powerful and very much opposed to this, and many local governments are in coal industry pockets and resist any coal reduction (this is one reason why nuclear was shut down first). Peaker gas plants operate only when the demand is high and supply is low, running on a much lower duty cycle than a baseload plant. The way things are going now, there's been a rapid nuclear phaseout and there's a glacial coal phaseout very slowly happening, but solar and wind installations have been growing and are displacing more and more baseload. Eventually this will price baseload coal power out of the market, and then we'll see if the coal terrorists are powerful enough to get a bailout or to get solar legally destroyed like they did in Spain.