Ok. Let's wait until 2013 - I'm pretty sure Germany is going to become reliant on imports again. Especially on imports of baseline power.

Duh. They're turned off nuclear power plants in August/September, so they are net exporter because nuclear power plants worked through most of the year.

Uhm. I hate to say, but you know nothing about power transmission. First, it matters very much where consumer and producer are located if power is transmitted over AC power lines simply because transit countries have to apply phase corrections to keep phases in sync. And phase shifters very much care about distances between producer and consumer. Then there's N+1 redundancy requirement and synchronization issues.

Nope. This year Germany is going to be a net importer (albeit not a large importer). Interconnectedness does not matter per se, no electricity from Germany is used in East Siberia and vice versa. Simply because of huge transmission losses. It's rare for electric power to be used more than a thousand kilometers from its source. And notion of transit countries is very much real and Germany is one of them. Or do you think that current simply goes through the air?

Yup. Germany has switched from energy exporter to weak energy importer with the shutdown of nuclear powerplants which your data omits. 2012 will be the first year with net imports.

Here's a link to a relevant chart: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemarkt#Entwicklung_der_Stromhandelsbilanz - notice how the power balance fell in 2011.

But don't worry! Greenpeace has a plan for it - build more dirty coal powerplants: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20110713-36277.html

Germany is NOT a net exporter. However, it's one of the main Central European electricity transit countries.

Molten salt storage is not a 'technology', but more of 'extract money from government' thing. It can't scale enough even in theory and it's horribly expensive and inefficient to boot.

By a ROCKET! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail#United_States_Postal_Service Oh, and fully armed nuclear warheads would of course be merely a courtesy detail.

And the funny thing that it was even not that "secret" of a technology (application was, of course!), I remember reading about "new life of a vacuum tube" in Soviet magazine for technically-inclined kids ("Yunyi Technic") sometime in my early teens, late 70s - early 80s -- I definitely remember reading about thin-film integrated vacuum tubes technology, and, I think, about it's rad-hardness (not using that word, of course, or better half of the reason why it is important ;-) ).

Paul B.

I think that a chunk of glass about 30 stories high can be called a "bead"... Losely... ;-)

Or, I think that letter \mu got lost while this story was flowing through ether, more likely!

Paul B.