Okay, so three things here:

1. You just changed the subject. Nothing you said there has any bearing on whether or not it’s a good idea to move subsidies from day-to-day batteries towards week-scale battery storage. In fact, you complaining that they have to compete with gas plants is more of a reason to subsidize them, not less. Gas plants can’t outcompete batteries on day-to-day trading anyways, with or without subsidies. It’s only at the week-scale that things get competitive.

2. We should absolutely not be burning coal instead of gas. Coal should be phased out.

3. These gas plants do burn biomass. Germany harvests and purifies methane from biomass, and mixes it into the fossil derived gas that powerplants burn. that’s one of the primary ways that biomass contributes to the grid. Also, these gas plants don’t even represent an increase in overall gas plants. Older less efficient gas plants are being decomissioned and newer gas plants are replacing them.

It’s fine if you don’t like the current government, I don’t like them either, but this habit where people just reflexively assume that literally everything they do is stupid and evil is not helpful.

What’s wrong with that? The entire point of subsidies it to encourage people to do something that’s not currently very economical.

Day-to-day selling of storage is extremely profitable without any subsidies already, so why should it be subsidized? The only thing blocking the addition of more day-to-day storage facilities is the process of actually applying for a grid hookup because there’s simply too many people making applications (because its so profitable)

Isn’t that kinda what you’d want to see though? I.e. if older less competitive businesses are not able to operate or compete, we don’t want them to just hold onto talented people, and we don’t want those talented people to be jobless. It’s good if those people go and start new, dynamic, competitive companies.

Obviously there’s a balance to be found, and we don’t want companies to be allowed to just dump employees for no reason every time they hit a hiccup, but Germany has very generous worker protections, and a strong social safety net. It’s good to see these people starting new companies.

China manipulates its currency and underpays its workers specifically to avoid that. Their strateigic plan is to keep their currency weak until all western industrial competition is dead, and only then do they jack up prices.

A nice one in my city (Cologne) is revamping some flood protections. Since I recently moved into a ground floor apartment near the Rhine, I appreciate that one a lot!