Is this the future of wind all over the world?
The salad days of wind power in Germany are over. Bad news is rolling in from several directions. Twenty years of hope-n-subsidies has run aground. Profits are grinding down, and hardly any new towers are being erected. People are fighting back against the noise, the views, and the bird chopping. Conservationists might like the idea of wind, as long as it’s in someone else’s forest. Suddenly groups that oppose wind towers are gaining traction, and the red tape and legal battles have grown wings and settled on new developments like a bat plague.
New turbines are now supposed to be two kilometers from any home, and there just isn’t enough spare land to build them on. German wind farms are running out of Germany.
If only they were profitable and provided an essential service, they might still have friends.
Wind energy in crisis as expansion stalls in Germany
Alex Reichmuth; Nebelspalter, via GWPF
Lengthy planning and approval procedures stand in the way of the expansion of wind energy. There is too little designated space for possible locations and too many lawsuits against projects. The resistance to the construction of wind turbines is enormous in many places. Countless nature conservationist groups and citizens’ groups see the landscape impaired, health threatened or rare birds in danger and are fighting with all possible means against new wind turbines. Frequently, political leaders of municipalities and states are against easing the elimination of wind power locations.
To make matters worse for the future of wind energy is the fact that many wind farms are threatened by shutdown. The German Renewable Energy Act which has been in force since 2000 guarantees wind turbine operators secure subsidies for twenty years. For thousands of wind projects this deadline will expire in the next few years. Without subsidies they are no longer profitable. By 2025, there is a risk of 15,000 MW of wind projects being lost which corresponds to over a quarter of Germany’s onshore wind power.
One Minister of Energy and Environment is talking of an industry in freefall:
“We are heading for a disaster,” said Lies to the “Handelsblatt”…
“If the federal government does not pull the rip cord, Germany faces a gigantic dismantling of wind energy with all the consequences for eliminating it.
The wind lobby want to build in forests. Apparently in order to save the wilderness from climate change we have to accost it acoustically. We know infrasound can cause humans to get nosebleeds, dizziness, rashes and headaches — what does it do to badgers and wildcats?
After we finish the human experiments perhaps we’ll start the animal ones?
The government of the state of Hesse is planning to declare two percent of the state’s area to be wind priority areas. That would have serious consequences for the last undisturbed forests and the countryside, according to the Hessian Association of Nature Conservation Initiative. Above all, the construction of wind turbines in the extensive Palatinate Forest means “another break of taboos by the red-green-yellow coalition in favor of the wind power industry”.
Germany has 30,000 wind turbines, but this spring they made a third less electricity than they did a year ago. There was less wind this year. Imagine if a third of expected coal production just broke?
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Image by pixelrockerz on Pixabay