Serial Exaggerator Al Gore Loses All Sense Of Reality…Exaggerates German Wind And Solar Power 178%

When listening to Al Gore’s numbers and figures, we really do need to worry that he may have completely lost his sense of reality. Otherwise we can only conclude that he is a stunningly unscrupulous fraud.

Gore-Armegeddon

Image cropped from: Rush Limbaugh site.

In Gore’s self-imagined climate-crisis world, global temperatures are accelerating, the center of the earth is several million degrees, mankind has only a few months left to live, and the ocean will soon swallow ground zero, where the World Trade Center once stood. His latest wild exaggeration: Industrial country Germany is now getting 37% of its energy needs from wind and solar.

“Journalistic fraud”

This and other claims made by Al Gore in a recent article in Rolling Stone Online, however, are completely false and totally foreign to reality. I know because I live in Germany and have written often about this topic. Gore’s portrayal of a German success is completely false. Moreover, Climate Depot here also brings up an interview where German renewable energy expert Steffen Henne calls Gore’s claims “journalistic fraud”.

Early in the Rolling Stone piece, Gore claims:

Germany, Europe’s industrial powerhouse, where renewable subsidies have been especially high, now generates 37 percent of its daily electricity from wind and solar; and analysts predict that number will rise to 50 percent by 2020. (Indeed, one day this year, renewables created 74 percent of the nation’s electricity!)

178% exaggeration

This is complete nonsense and it is obvious that Gore, or his researchers, never bothered to check the readily available facts. Just a quick look at Wikipedia here (hardly a shill for the fossil fuel industry) and we get the de-fantasized figures on the share of total power (2012) that wind and sun have in Germany:

Wind: 8%
Solar: 5.3%
Total wind and solar: 13.3%
Gore’s claim: 37%
Factor of exaggeration: 178%

In fact, all the renewable energies combined, i.e. solar, wind, biogas, hydroelectric, etc. amount only to 25% share of Germany’s total energy supplied as of 2012. Already leading officials concede there is little chance of reaching 40% total renewable energy by 2020, let alone 50% with only solar and wind.

Germany’s skyrocketing electricity prices

Far more significant is that Gore totally ignores the dark side of Germany’s renewable energy push: It has caused Germany’s electricity prices to soar, so much so that 600,000 German households were having their power cut off every year. Peter Altmaier, former environment minister under Angela Merkel, said Germany’s renewable energy obligations will cost consumers almost 1 trillion euros by 2030.

And Gore forgets to mention that almost every solar module manufacturer in Germany has gone bankrupt, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of “jobs for the future”.

Unstable power grid

In addition, the erratic feed-in of the constantly fluctuating supply of wind and sun is putting the stability of Germany’ power grid in serious jeopardy. Many industries that rely on stable source of electricity are thinking twice about investing in Germany and are increasingly considering moving operations to foreign locations.

Gore also fails to tell his rock-and-roll readers that Germany has brought on-line more coal power over the past years in an effort to stabilize its base power supply. German CO2 emissions are back on the rise.

He fails to mention that many of the generous renewable energy subsidies have since been scaled back in an effort to keep the exploding costs and power grid stability from careening completely out of control.

Biodiversity genocide

Gore forgets to mention that Germany’s biogas industry has turned a large part of the country’s landscape into a giant corn-field monoculture that has resulted in large-scale biodiversity genocide. Germany’s imports of palm oil from tropical countries has also led to the mass deforestation of once pristine rainforests abroad. These biotopes are now lost for a very long time, if not forever.

Already just the first few paragraphs of Gore’s Rolling Stone piece are so detached from reality and false that everything he writes thereafter is likely of the same quality. People should have stopped listening to Gore a long time ago.

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PS: See “Frozen Wasteland” featuring Al Gore.

 

21 responses to “Serial Exaggerator Al Gore Loses All Sense Of Reality…Exaggerates German Wind And Solar Power 17821”

  1. Ric Werme

    I haven’t checked, but I suspect that “37 percent of its daily electricity from wind and solar” should have referred to an instantaneous supply, not a full day or daily. I.e. the peak production some sunny, breezy day.

  2. Ric Werme

    Maybe I should have read the second sentence – “(Indeed, one day this year, renewables created 74 percent of the nation’s electricity!)”

    Scratch my first comment!

  3. Ric Werme

    Let me try with this:

    Total wind and solar: 13.3%
    Gore’s claim: 37%
    Factor of exaggeration: 278%

    “Factor” is good, but “exaggeration” confuses things.

    If Gore say 13.3%, that would be a factor 100% of the actual total, and 0% more than the actual. What would the “factor of exaggeration” be? I’d say the exaggeration would be 0, so 0%. His 37% exaggerates by 23.7% of the total power, or 178% of the actual contribution by wind and solar.

    1. DirkH

      Ric; doesn’t matter – for Gore’s standards he was pretty close! Thinking of the millions of degrees in the Earth’s crust… Anything less than a factor of 1000 off is basically surgical accuracy for him.

  4. Kurt in Switzerland

    Look at the Bundesministerium data.

    http://www.bmwi.de/DE/Themen/Energie/Energiedaten-und-analysen/Energiedaten/energietraeger.html

    Renewables account for 23% of electrical power production (2013)
    PV & wind make up just over half of renewables’ contribution, or 12.4% of the total.

    Gore claims that PV and wind make up 37% of the total.

    So he’s tripled the actual data to arrive at his own version of reality.
    In essence, nothing has changed.

    Kurt in Switzerland

  5. Moose

    Leaving all percentage details aside.
    Manbearpig (AG) is a liar and has become filthy rich by spreading the green agenda.

    M.

  6. Ed Caryl

    “stunningly scrupulous fraud”
    You mean stunningly unscrupulous fraud.

  7. John F. Hultquist

    Rolling Stone ought to initiate a review process.
    Don’t they occasionally deal with numbers, rankings, and such.
    A carpenter always measures twice and then cuts once.
    I wonder if the editors know they have been had?
    –————————-

    “People should have stopped listening to Gore a long time ago.”
    Indeed. So long ago I can’t remember when.
    –————————-

    Local wind energy went to zero late Friday, after winds blew like h— for a week.
    http://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
    [This is real time, 5 minute updates; view now or over the next 5 days.]

    1. Ed Caryl

      Amazing number of sawmills on that list!

      1. John F. Hultquist

        Many years ago, in the eastern US forests, small sawmills were plentiful. In the 1950s and into the 60s one could back a pickup truck up to an old sawdust pile and take a load home for use in a garden or for landscaping. Along with most things industrial, consolidation of companies happened. Then economics (the bottom line) became important and someone realized that sawdust was a fuel. The brown line in the chart represents some of these places – the one’s that feed into the BPA grid.

        Now the concept is called cogeneration. Big landfills and such produce gas and this too is fuel. I have not visited a landfill site that does this. I guess that should go on my “to do” list.
        Washington State has very limited coal now, although the first railroads used coal from underground mines. Many think there are resources here but a very complex stratigraphy and thick layers of basalt make finding and recovering anything difficult. The old “North American Plate” is close to the Idaho/WA boundary. If anyone cares, here’s a link.
        http://www.burkemuseum.org/static/geo_history_wa/New%20Lands%20Along%20an%20Old%20Coast%20v.2.7.htm
        “New Lands Along the Old Coast”

  8. Graeme No.3

    Those who are treated as Gods soon become mad.
    He’s lost all touch with reality, just like James Hansen.
    (and the Prince of Wales also for what that matters).

  9. DirkH

    Looks like that expensive semiconductor voltage transformer station at Offshore windpark BARD 1 got damaged or destroyed in a fire.
    http://www.ksta.de/wirtschaft/-bard-1-hochsee-windpark-vorlaeufig-ausser-betrieb,15187248,27573116.html

    North of Borkum; first German offshore windpark; now offline since March; repair has been postponed. Guess they had to fire up the Diesels again to keep the turbines turning to prevent damage.

  10. oebele bruinsma

    Would you buy a second hand car ( from Al Gore) which characteristics have been exagerated by 178 percent?

  11. Loodt Pretorius

    Is renewable energy the reason the Germans are so good at football?

    If that is the case, I am all for renewables here in the UK.

  12. Peter

    Ah. Gore’s quote was

    “Germany, Europe’s industrial powerhouse, where renewable subsidies have been especially high, now generates 37 percent of its daily electricity from wind and solar”.

    He has just taken the figure for renewables and clearly not understood the huge contribution of biomass and hydro to renewables in Germany. Of course the biomass figure is huge compared with anywhere else.

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