Amory Lovins' Propaganda Makes little sense

Only a couple of days after I posted Electricity Sector Lessons from Ontario and Germany...

In Germany's Renewables Revolution, Amory Lovins mixes messages relentlessly in attempting to display Germany as a success story for renewables.
Lovins begins the post with:

While the examples of Japan, China, and India show the promise of rapidly emerging energy economies built on efficiency and renewables, Germany—the world’s number four economy and Europe’s number one—has lately provided an impressive model of what a well-organized industrial society can achieve.... [Germany] remains the best disproof of claims that highly industrialized countries, let alone cold and cloudy ones, can do little with renewables.

Even so, Germans pay a lot for their household electricity, about $0.34/kWh in 2012. The household tariff includes a “renewables surcharge,” expected to amount to roughly $249 per three-person household this year. That’d be three-fifths smaller if households weren’t subsidizing many businesses, mainly large ones—exempted from nearly the whole renewables charge, allegedly to boost German competitiveness—by 3–4 billion Euros a year. Yet German industry enjoys the lower spot prices that renewables create, so it pays about the same for electricity as it did in 1978 ...

It takes two paragraphs for Lovins to argue that Germany's industry is proof that renewables don't damage an economy, and to show that Germany's industry hasn't borne any of the cost of renewables (in fact he later shows how it benefited as excess supply dropped the market rates).

He doesn't get any more coherent after that.

ENTSO-E data to end of 2012 - do you see what Lovins does not?

Lovins' footnote to the post begins: "The author gratefully acknowledges helpful data and comments by Craig Morris in Freiburg, whose blog is an exceptionally valuable source on Germany’s energy shift..."

Morris posted today, noting some issues with Lovins' facts, in "Do The Math"
Morris' post also notes a post from 'carbon counter' Robert Wilson - probably the real inspiration for Morris to provide more plausible figures than Lovins had.

A point from my Electricity Sector Lessons from Ontario and Germany post is that the next large expense pending for Germany's system is capacity payments for traditional generators

• If solar produces at only a 10% capacity factor, more than 10% of domestic demand cannot be met without other sources (including storage) - or installing more solar than the system will, at times, be able to handle (thus lowering the capacity factor and increasing the unit cost)
• If wind produces at only a 20% capacity factor, more than 20% of domestic demand cannot be met without other sources (including storage) - or installing more turbine capacity than the system will, at times, be able to handle (thus lowering the capacity factor and increasing the unit cost)

Those strike me as firm limits beyond which prices will again escalate.   

At levels far below that, the presence of renewable discourages investment in the baseload technologies characterized by high up-front capital costs and low operating costs - meaning renewables are likely to be accompanied by higher emissions generators in a system.

The National Inventory Reports for 2011 (filed in 2013) are now available for Germany, and Canada; Canada's including a break-down by province allowing a comparison of Germany and nuclear-heavy Ontario.

The CO2 equivalent emissions from "electricity and heat" in Germany are 21 times higher than the same category in Ontario (Germany being 5.4 -6 times greater in GDP and population).

Including the residential category drops the difference to 11.4 times.

Whatever Lovins motivation is, it certainly doesn't appear to be emissions.