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I reported what a friend saw, not myself. I believe he said that he was flying out of Stuttgart which may very well be a city with a higher or much higher than normal solar PV presence than other German locals. But this is just in the early stages.

You got lost in your ideology which shut your brain down and caused you to set up a nonsensical equation. First, the 19.9% is the percentage of electrical production from renewables and doesn't measure anything about the country's total energy usage. The actual figure which measures the percentage of total energy consumed in the form of electricity is around 15%, as it is in with any modern industrial nation. The figures I found put electricity as a percentage of total energy use at slightly over 15% for Germans and slightly under 15% for Americans.

Secondly, you don't divide by a percentage, you multiply to find the percentage of total German energy use supplied by solar. Currently the numbers and equation are 3.2% times 15% which amounts to about 1/2percent of total energy use supplied by solar, three times the amount you posted. Yes, it's still a small percentage, but you exaggerated the smallness considerably.

The point is how far the Germans have come in a very short time and where they are headed. Note that the 20% renewable figure for electrical production only accounts for about 3% of total energy use (20%*15%). Note also that a significant percentage today of renewables for electricity (about 40%) is from Hydro and biomass burning. Hydro and biomass cannot grow significantly, if at all, so solar and wind must take up the slack and provide the growth. I'm saying that even the conservative Germans think that they can get to 80-100% of electricity production from renewables by mid-century. They know that they'd better damn well do it or suffer immeasurably, because fossils from other parts of the world will rapidly become unavailable as those folks use more and more of their own fossils and have less to export.

Can they make it to keep the same energy profligacy as today? Probably on the basis of the current energy mix, they can, but I very much doubt if the current energy mix will be similar in 2050. By then it's likely that electricity will account for 40-50% of the energy mix, rather than 15%, as the electrical transport, industry and heating economy grows. That makes the renewable solution 4 times as difficult and expensive. But at least they'll be able to hunker down and survive. We won't, if we don't get off our asses.

I'm guessing that every word that Chris writes is informed by this urgency and you-all who po-po it with your cornucopian fossil fool fantasies are doing our nation great harm. Whether it's 3 years or 20 years before the energy crunch, that crunch is inevitable and catastrophic if we don't act to deal with it now, with all speed, into renewables. If we don't, we'll end up with a nation turned into a drilled, fracked, mined wasteland with nothing to show for it other than despair. The time of extraction and exploitation is at a well deserved end, and its only ethical justification is to use it to bury it.

And then there is climate change!