No, we sell energy almost the entire time and seldom need to buy any.

You are not forced, you make money selling your energy. When you don't produce much because of lack of solar and wind, Germany's energy also is expensive (because with little wind and solar, coal and gas are the expensive sources) and you have to pay more. But this only happens few hours of the year. The last 1,5 weeks electricity was 50€/ MWh which is really cheap :)

The European Energy Market is not an EU thing, but as a resident of Skåne I concur with your view. Germany got rid of Nuclear too early so, on occasion where the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine there, we get exposed to extreme and uncapped price changes. I pay hourly and this is my power bill for December so far. Just power, no extras. €50 for ONE day. Luckily we have had a warm spell, it has been windier than usual and I haven’t needed to use the EV since.

61% of the german electicity production comes from renewables.