Hasn't been seen so far. Germany is building new coal and has taken many older plants out of mothballed status since Fukushima and planned closure of the nuclear power plants.

Perhaps in very distant future, they will start reducing the dependence on coal. Right now, German coal buildup is a massive manna from heaven for power plant building companies in what is otherwise a very challenging market outside China.

No. Energy generation is a very difficult thing in that entire grid must stay within certain tolerance levels. We're talking about gigawatts per hour, so your swimming pool would have to be a size of a large lake or two and would obviously not be worth the cost.

They used to pump electricity up into potential energy water storage in some places, but those have been in dire need of upgrades and for some fucked up reason (which is an apt summary of the entire Energiewende really) are not supported and are actually closed down. All while new coal and gas is being massively built up so that they have hot reserve ready to go for the renewables fluctuations.

Most Germans live in cities where such investment is impossible.

That is incorrect. In many countries, such as my own (Finland) you can actually choose which power provider to use.

My bill basically consists of two parts. One comes from utility provider providing power transmission wires to my home (which I cannot choose for obvious reasons) and one comes from the provider of electrical power to the grid (which I can choose from anywhere in Finland).

I live in city of Tampere, and buy electricity from provider in Kouvola (https://www.kssenergia.fi/). The distance between our cities is several hundred kilometers, but this works because electric grid is unified, and what actually happens is that provider feeds a certain amount of energy into the grid, and whatever energy I take out is billed according to our contract. Provider is required to feed this much power (+ certain surplus for transmission) into the grid at its local exchange. This creates competition between electricity generating companies while transmission fees are monitored by government to ensure that they are in line with spending and do not abuse the monopolistic rights (since they are the only provider in the area for obvious reasons).

This system enables healthy competition for power providers without upending utilities.

In all Nordics, as far as I know, photographing your own ballot after it has been filled is illegal for very reason. It made national news when some people took selfies with their ballots and several professors of law and history did a pretty detailed explanation on why these laws are in place (history of democracy and massive levels of abuse related to voter intimidation).

You don't need to hold the person hostage. You just need to take away their electronic id card for the rest of the day.

This isn't a strawman. This is a real threat, and something that has significant history of happening in the past with democracy. Please stop pretending that "doing stuff with computers is always better" and actually study the history behind the issue.

Youtube accepts h.264, and going from 30fps to 60fps means increase in relatively small b-frames (frames which tell the difference between previous frame and current one) and likely few to no I-frames (large full picture frames).

As a result, file size likely won't go up all that much after encoding to h.264. Raw video output will double however, so if you can't encode on the fly, you will need double writing speed to long term storage.

Let me help you. Are you familiar with concept of "voter intimidation" and why it doesn't work at polling stations?

Scenario: You are a part of a company. Your boss tells you to vote a certain way or face problems at work. You have no other good places to work and you have no way of proving he said that.

In current situation, this is impossible for said boss to enforce. You can tell him you will vote the way he wants, and even if he shows up at the polling station with you, there is no way for him to check which number you actually wrote on the ballot. Result: Voter intimidation not a viable tactic.
In a case of electronic voting from any PC terminal, all said boss needs to do is stand next to you as you vote. Result: Voter intimidation a viable tactic.

In a nutshell: electronic voting from uncontrolled environment has severe problems because of lack of anonymity compared to voting at polling station. If it presents no significant tangible advantages, it should absolutely be scrapped to avoid increasing democratic problems while presenting on clear democratic benefits.

There is one severe issue with online voting. It doesn't occur in a controlled environment. As a result, it's possible to check what other person actually voted for. This enables tactics like voter intimidation and bribery, something that is not viable at polling stations, because at polling station you can say you voted for one politician, and actually have voted for another.

There is no way for anyone check. Voting is anonymous. All it takes to check who you voted for electronically is to sit next to you as you vote. If you think this isn't much of a problem, consider your average family with an abusive father figure who has strong political beliefs in far right nazi party.

This is in fact one of the biggest problems of online voting. It's very difficult to force someone to vote a certain way at a polling station, as there is no way to check what the other person voted for.

It's very easy to check what the other person voted for in electronic voting process. That makes intimidation, bribing and so on viable tools for collecting votes.

That's standard in all Nordics. Additionally people staffing the stations are mostly volunteers. Here in Finland for example, you find mostly elderly (former) political/democratic activists who find its their duty to show up and ensure country is democratic with some younger people with similar goals also in the mix.

As a result, most of the cost is logistics and paper trail. Pretty much everything else, such as buildings used, equipment used and so on is reused.

Note that your argument is the same as the argument of creationists: "I cannot agree that conclusion I prepared doesn't match the facts on the ground".

No, just a buddy with keys to the Colorado research division of ConGlomCo...
but I may have said too much...

Actually, solar has made them more dependent on natural gas, because solar needs base power when it's "not at peak" which is most of the time. And this needs to be hot reserve, spun and ready to pick up the slack in just a few seconds when a cloud crosses over the field of panels.

In Germany, most of that is handled through coal and gas, of which it has consumed a lot more of recently due to Energiewende policies on top of closure of nuclear power plants.