I thought it was a well-done and wide-ranging article describing the current state of affairs, and is a nice piece for a mainstream media source. The impending changes to the US and global electricity markets are well known to wonks and utility owners at this point (having become accepted wisdom about 1-2 years ago), but have not penetrated into the popular consciousness yet. One visible effect, however, is that the Renewable Energy naysayers have largely fallen silent, anticipating the success of RE, and trying to avoid future embarrassment.
While not really explicitly saying it, though, I thought that the article could give some naive readers the wrong idea. They paint the Germans as ahead of us, and on an expensive path to a RE future, which implicitly suggests that RE in the future in the US will be a similarly expensive proposition. I happen to believe that there are many RE paths to a low-CO2 emission future, and which path a country or state takes depends on its particular needs for energy (mostly population density) and the local resources (mostly solar, wind and hydro).
From this point of view, everyone is different. Some lucky places already have so much hydro relative to their population (Quebec, PNW) that they are already nearly at 100% RE. Similarly, some locations will find it relatively inexpensive to develop large amounts of (on-shore) wind and PV solar, and could in principle field enough of those (if and when inexpensive storage exists) to get to 100% energy. For example, the US prairie states and Scotland could get to 100% on-shore wind energy, the Western and Southern US states could get 100% of their energy from PV solar.
The key difference between the US and Germany, however, is that I think we have a lot more RE resources, and that will make the task of the US getting to high RE penetration cheaper and easier than in Germany. all of the lower 48 states have far more of the most abundant RE resource, solar, than any location in Germany. Our onshore wind and hydro potential are better per capita. Our off-shore wind resource is also great.
In the US, things are moving forward driven by the almighty dollar. As PV gets cheaper it will continue to grow. California's solar penetration has jumped a lot in the last year, and is now >5% of grid energy (not peak power, total ENERGY over 24 hours), and growing exponentially with a doubling time of ~18 mos. Germany is around 6-7% and growing linearly at 1% per year. So California, with 2/3rds the GDP and population of Germany, will likely blow past Germany's solar fraction in a year or two. Is that because Californians are more righteous? Greener? Nope, they just have 3x the solar resource (hours of sun per year), so developing solar costs 1/3rd as much. With the same number of panels per capita that Germany has now (installed at current lower prices), CA would be close to 20% solar energy fraction.
The German's commitment is admirable, but they have a relatively lousy RE hand. Their on-shore wind is cheap, but there is not enough to get to 100% energy. Their solar is expensive due to the poor resource (few hours of sun per year). Off-shore is plentiful (and has great capacity factor, limiting intermittency effects), so that is their holy grail. Current prices are higher than hoped for ~$0.20/kWh for generation. If prices do fall, then there is a lot of opportunity there for Germany, if they don't they might grit their teeth and build it anyway.
In the US, the whole process will be driven by cheap PV, from capitalists from below, rather than govt programs from above.
