Yup. Another good option is co-locating with renewables. In Scotland, there's several BESS projects that are being built on the north/renewable side of a big grid bottleneck between Scotland and England, because the grid upgrades take a long time.

(maps https://www.spenergynetworks.co.uk/pages/cross_border_projec... - it's an odd area, mostly beautiful in that stark empty way a lot of Scotland is, but there's really not a lot of human use already there apart from marginal sheep farming because the land is too steep to till.)

NIMBYs are the reason why large parts of the mentioned new 700 km Südlink connection are being built as below ground cables, adding enomous costs.

> and NIMBYs are quick to oppose them

I have a solution: higher energy prices for those opposing NIMBYs and cheaper for YIMBYs .

So many issues in politics would be solved if the voters of certain policies were the only ones affected by them instead of writing cheques everyone else has to cash.

Turning the nuclear plant back on would have been even better. And then putting a battery next to it would have been even better then that.

With batteries one could argue building them in a more distributed way might make more sense for overall resiliancy.

A fleet of like 70 nuclear plants at maybe 50 location could likely power all of Germany. For batteries you would likely go to 100 to 1000s of locations.

But that said, using the existing connections in some places does make sense.