Unfortunately, the Kombikraftwerk studies were modeled for a completely different country. Germany has become a different place over the last 12 years. The current scale of EV charging, the boom in heat pumps and data centers weren't factored in back then. In 2014, there was unlimited access to cheap Russian gas, which was considered a guaranteed grid balancer.

As for biogas and hydro, it depends on how you look at it. Betting on biogas/biomass doesn't really work at a utility scale in practice. The energy density of biomass is abysmally low. Replacing baseload generation with biogas would require converting a critical amount of arable land from food to energy production. Who is going to give that up?

There's a problem with hydro, too. Germany has no room to scale hydro generation. All the available valleys are already flooded.

How much of this biomass will be imported? Lot of the biomass used in Denmark, much smaller and less industrial country than Germany, to form baseload power generation is imported.

"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."

https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark

https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...

So Denmark replaced lot of imported fossil fuels with imported wood.

Could we scale this form of energy generation to energy requirements of China, India?

Germany plans massive expansion of imports of hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives.

https://usa-germany-cep.org/fileadmin/usa/Documents/1612_Ger...

https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/EN/Pre...