Rules For Enviro-Radicals: Pick The Landscape, Mechanize It, Desecrate It

H/T EIKE
The folly of windfarms and solar panels knows no boundaries. For example nowhere today in the north German area where I live is it possible to drive or take my bike 10 minutes anywhere without seeing a cluster of white behemoths chopping through the landscape (and birds).
Photo source: www.greenpeace.org. Here Greenpeace is major proponent of such let’s-target-and-desecrate-the-landscape projects.

Just days ago, Germany’s leading, renown political daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) had a piece on the dark side of alternative energy sources, writing:

This program for ‘rescuing the climate’ is reckless, technocratic and ugly.

The FAZ adds,

Wind and solar parks will change the landscape with no consideration of protecting nature. Soon seeing natural landscape  will be possible only by looking in story books.

In fact, disfiguring the landscape is taking on such proportions and has gotten so out of control that some of the windmills’ former proponents, real environmentalists, are now beginning to sober up and are painfully realising the disaster they’ve helped to create.

The FAZ reports that even the President of the Federal Environmental Department, Jochen Flasbarth, is having second thoughts. He warns that an attempt to supply Germany with 100% renewable energy by 2050 will lead to a:

…huge aggravation of its citzens. The unavoidable consequence of a decentralized supply of renewable energy is that it will lead to an alteration of the landscape in many regions.

Face it, windparks need lots of space and are eyesores. It takes 1000 large 5-MW turbines to replace a single 1000 megawatt coal fired power plant. And because the turbines rarely work at 100% capacity (20% is typical) you need 5 times as many! And when the wind stops blowing, you need a conventional power plant to kick in anyway (200% capacity to ensure 100% supply).

And because land is not in plentiful supply, many projects are slated for offshore. The FAZ writes:

Most people don’t have any idea as to how big the dimensions of these windparks are, and even less an ideas of the ecological damage they cause to marine wildlife during their set-up and threat they pose to shipping vessels later. Germany’s Green party and environmental groups are silent on this topic.

The sprouting of offshore windmills is becoming such a threat that even the WWF warns of the Wild Wild West of the Baltic Sea. Sweden’s The Local writes on wind energy development until 2030:

Wind energy resources are forecast to undergo significant expansion over the period, from a current 400 megawatts to 25,000 megawatts which correspond to a 60-fold increase by 2030. Much of the expansion in wind energy will occur at sea.

Ironically environmentalists always protest loudly when it comes to building a new street, fearing for the life of field mice and worms. Yet they don’t seem to care about the destruction of natural scenery that hundreds of windparks cause and the thousands of migratory birds they kill as they navigate through their beloved machanized killing fields.

Well, how can that be? It gets down to green money. According to the FAZ:

Greenpeace earns money in replacing highly efficient, space-saving coal and nuclear power with extremely expensive, vast space-consuming, ugly and dangerous-to-wildlife, mechanized eyesores that happened to have the ecological seal of approval.

I ask myself: How much longer will it be before the real environmentalists and citizens wake up to this utter folly?