This report on Yahoo Finance rather seems to miss the point.

The report claims that "Germany has too many solar panels", and as a result, wholesale energy prices (what solar energy producers get from the energy distributors) during peak production hours have dropped by 87% in the last 10 days, and "raw market energy prices fall into negative territory during these hours."

The idea that there are too many solar panels in Germany is, of course, nonsense. The nation is still generating electricity from natural gas, nuclear power plants and even coal powered stations. Consumer prices for electricity have fallen a little since the peaks reached at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but are still higher than pre-war levels.

The problem is that, while private enterprise has taken tremendous strides in rolling out new solar power generation capacity, the government and the grid operators have not taken matching steps to provide increased energy storage capacity (battery and other storage technologies), so that cheap solar energy can be used while the sun is not shining.

It has become clear that one of the reasons that German industry was so successful was the low energy prices paid by industry (due to the very favourable deals that Germany made with Russia), and now that is over, the country's economy is in the doldrums. Government investment in energy storage is exactly the kind of infrastructure spending that governments are meant to, and indeed must, undertake.

The government seems to understand that they need to act decisively and quickly to boost the economy, and are taking action to fill the skill shortages and mitigate some of the taxation disincentives that are hampering economic growth, but don't seem to see the need for energy storage infrastructure.

There is a chance that this is just a problem with lead times. Energy storage infrastructure takes a while to build and bring online (longer than the time to roll out solar energy generation); maybe the German government has a slew of such projects in progress already, and we just need to be patient. I suspect, however, that the reality is that any energy storage projects will be too few and too late.