Germany’s Bavaria Moves To Kill Off Unsightly Inland Wind Industry Using 10H Rule … “Citizens Have To Be Protected”

I got an email from the head of an Ontario wind-turbine protest-group seeking information about wind power development in Germany.

Ontario, it appears, is poised to industrialize its landscape – thinking this will somehow lead to nicer weather. The head of the protest group wrote that the Ontario windpark promoters and lobbyists “are continually referring to Germany and their Energiewende and how successful their implementation of renewables is in that country.”

First off, the claim that the Energiewende in Germany has been successful is an outright lie, and it shows that Ontarian leaders haven’t done their homework on wind power and renewables. The German politicians and activists who spread that myth forgot to mention that 1) German power rates have skyrocketed due to the feed-in act, 2) industries are now threatening to leave, citing costly and unreliable energy supply, and 3) protests against windparks in Germany are becoming increasingly fierce as nobody wants them in their backyard anymore. Moreover, the outputs are far from what was promised. More than ever plans for new windparks are being forced offshore. But there too the technical problems, and thus profitability problems, are great.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Germany is drastically scaling back its subsidies for renewable energies and windparks. Last year alone Germany saw a 55% plunge in solar investments, and over the last 2 years Germany’s solar manufacturing industry has been all but obliterated. So much for the green dream.

How has Germany been coping with its struggling Energiewende? Answer: they’ve been quietly bringing coal power plants back on line. Last year CO2 emissions climbed for the second year in a row. In a nutshell: Germany’s landscape has been littered with windparks and and solar panels, yet it’s burning more coal today than ever.

10H rule

With all the failure you’d think Germany would be reconsidering its Energiewende. It turns out that the country is doing precisely that.

For example in the idyllic German state of Bavaria, Minister President Horst Seehofer has put into place a 10H rule for new proposed windparks in order to protect citizens and their property. The 10H rule requires wind turbines to keep a minimum distance from of 10 times the turbine’s height from residential areas. For example, a 200-meter tall turbine would need to have a distance of 2000 meters from the nearest home. The result: it disqualifies most plans for new wind parks.

Seehofer says that while he wants to see wind turbines in the state, citizens have to be protected from them.

But the powerful wind lobby is howling in reaction: “The consequence will be the end of the Energiewende,” said Günter Beermann, Chairman of the state association for wind energy.”

The online Main Post here also writes:

The head of the Greens in the state parliament had even harsher words. Ludwig Hartmann from Landsberg: ‘With the 10H distance rule wind energy in Bavaria is dead. […] If wind energy cannot find a home in Bavaria, then the Energiewende in Bavaria will not function.’ The environment expert is calling for sticking to the plan of expanding wind turbines in Bavaria to 1500. Currently there are 600. Minister president Seehofer has distanced himself from the expansion target. ‘I assume that the number will be considerably less with our new concept,’ he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.”

The oxygen for the wind industry is getting fatally thin in Southern Germany. And even if Seehofer should fail to uphold his 10H rule, then chances will still remain bleak for the wind industry in Bavaria. This is due in large part to the considerable technical and economic shortcomings of onshore wind power. The Main Post writes:

Behind this there is the question of how much wind is there at a location and how profitably can a turbine operate. The rule of thumb: Wind turbines at the coast can produce about 100 percent, wind turbines offshore out in the open sea about 140 percent, wind turbines inland however only about 70 to 80 percent. Which wind turbines are to get subsidized in the future remains the decision of the federal government. Should the limit be set at 80%, then wind energy in Bavaria no longer has a chance. On that experts of the CSU and the opposition both agree.”

And in an interview with the Neue Energie magazine here, German federal parliamentarian Josef Göppel said:

If the pincer movement using the rule with minimum distance of ten times the turbine’s height and minimum performance of 75% gets used, then there will be no chance left for wind power in Southern Germany.”

 

21 responses to “Germany’s Bavaria Moves To Kill Off Unsightly Inland Wind Industry Using 10H Rule … “Citizens Have To Be Protected””

  1. A. Oakley

    Thank you for this Pierre. We here in Ontario Canada have bandits running the government and snake oil salesmen running amok in our once great province. Both are running and sneaking around like mad selling the green ideology and a garbage product to the sheeple. The rest of us our battling back tooth and nail and are up against an impenetrable wall of corruption, greed and ignorance. We are using our intelligence and truth to go over the wall and eventually we will prevail. If the mother ship of renewables (Germany) is crashing then all other countries will not be far behind.I am reposting this article on our site, Mothers Against Wind Turbines

  2. Billy

    I have to ask. Offshore wind produces 140% of what?

    1. DirkH

      140% of the coastal ones.

      1. Wijnand

        The rule of thumb: Wind turbines at the coast can produce about 100 percent, wind turbines offshore out in the open sea about 140 percent, wind turbines inland however only about 70 to 80 percent.

        DirkH, you say offshore will produce 140% of the coastal ones. Ok.

        Then my follow-up question is: the ones at the coast produce 100%, but 100% of what?
        If this is just to compare the three options to each other I would have expected something like “IF you set the production of coastal to 100%, then…” or something to that effect.
        Regards,

        Wijnand

        1. DirkH

          If I said, the DAX is at 220% of what it was five years back, would you be able to understand that statement? If yes, smart cookie. If no, tough luck. I’ll leave it at that; I didn’t make the original statement and am not in the mood to defend a journalist against silly semantic points.

          1. Wijnand

            Dirk,
            Pierre (or a another moderator perhaps) did not allow through my followup comment, in which I stated to please ignore my comment because the subject was discussed further below in the comments.

            Your testy reaction is a little uncalled for though. I simply wanted to ask if anybody understood this 100% thing or if it was perhaps a mistake in the translation or something. Below I read an explanation from Pierre, stating that what is meant is that if your set coastal ones at 100%, then the others do 140 etc. This is however NOT clear from the original text. So your jibe about semantics is a little uncalled for.
            But don’t worry, I will not bother you anymore with “semantics”.

          2. DirkH

            Wijnand
            15. Januar 2014 at 15:34 | Permalink | Reply
            “This is however NOT clear from the original text”

            Please let me assure you that the original German text -which I checked- is typical sloppy formulation by a German journalist. That is why I said that I don’t want to defend a journalist against your complaints. There is no deeper mystery there.

  3. Moose

    Wind power was destined to fail from the beginning due to the fact that, by definition, wind is unreliable.
    Sorry to see that the landscape of this planet is totally ruined by these ugly monsters.
    The cleanup can not start soon enough.

  4. Ontario Government uses Germany as a great example of the “success of Wind Turbines”…….it’s an out and out LIE!!! | The Big Green Lie

    […] Germany’s Bavaria Moves To Kill Off Unsightly Inland Wind Industry Using 10H Rule … “Citizens … […]

  5. DirkH

    Attention: Schleswig Holstein in the North recently did the opposite and reduced the safety distance to I think 300m or so. It is of course related to which wing of the only party in the German Bundestag – the Pro-EU party – the citizens voted for. Local politicians are often gung ho on wind power because it gives their villages tax income; land owners often want it to be able to take rent.
    Bavaria being a relatively rich state is not as easily bribed as the cash strapped North or the hopelessly broke Northrhine Westphalia.

    1. Bernd Felsche

      Too bad that the windmills are driving away the tourists to resorts abroard; where the quiet landscapes haven’t become industrialised.

      Never mind; those monuments to folly are temporary at best. Seldom living up to expectations in generating capacity, financial returns and service life.

  6. DirkH

    Pierre, you mention several German newspapers’ reactions. It might come in handy to know this survey asking journalists for their political affiliation. Asked which party they are close to the answers were
    36,1 % none
    26,9 % Greens
    15,5 % SPD (social democrats)
    9,0 % CDU/CSU (“Conservatives”)
    7,4 % FDP (“Classical Liberals”)
    Article contains much more info; but this suffices to explain the hysterically Green reporting in Germany.
    http://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/money-inside-was-journalisten-waehlen_aid_1032835.html

  7. Graeme No.3

    70-80%, 100%, 140%???? What are these figures?
    Apart from someone’s delusion.

    The average on-shore wind farm produces some power 60-70% of the time, but at least half the amount generated comes in 25% of the times. Even so, an average yearly generation of 30% of its nominal capacity is regarded as very good, and obtained only from very good sites.

    In Germany on-shore wind turbines return 15-16% of their capacity, so pro rata on these figures the best they expect from deep sea turbines is a capacity factor of 32%. The better UK farms can reach 36%, or so we are told.

    Off-shore farms cost at least as much as an equivalent capacity of a coal fired plant, return at best 36% as much electricity, and have vastly higher maintenance costs, and the equipment lasts less than half as long. So as an investor you have a choice between a reliable producer of cheap electricity or an intermittent source of electricity costing at least 3 times as much. Only someone spending other people’s money would chose wind.

    1. DirkH

      Hey, the Dutch built their empire on wind power in the 17th century by building the most efficient sawmills of the planet and the greatest trade fleet.

      1. Moose

        Why do you think they stopped using it the moment the industrial revolution became a fact?

        1. DirkH

          “In the United States, the sawmill was introduced soon after the colonisation of Virginia by recruiting skilled men from Hamburg. Later the metal parts were obtained from the Netherlands,[9] where the technology was far ahead of that in England, where the sawmill remained largely unknown until the late 18th century.”
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawmill

          …late 18th century is what the Brits would call the industrial revolution… you know; it’s not the conintental’s fault that the Anglosaxons boast about learning some tricks 200 years later…

  8. John F. Hultquist

    Regarding power from wind (that is mostly N2 & O2), I found the following helpful. (The links to images are broken. Sorry. Perhaps on another server?)

    http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6018

    Understanding E = mc2
    by William Tucker

  9. DirkH

    In 2013, 71% of the participants at the “academy of the Bavarian press” were female. Whether or not this can be directly transferred to the male/female ratio of currently lying journalists is unknown but it is a hint to the cause of the quantum leap in quality in German journalism from reality to la-la-land.
    http://www.pi-news.net/2014/01/immer-weniger-maenner-werden-journalisten/

  10. Germany’s Bavaria Moves To Kill Off Unsightly Wind Energy Industry Using 10H Rule | Mothers Against Wind Turbines

    […] So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Germany is drastically scaling back its subsidies for renewable energies and windparks. Last year alone Germany saw a 55% plunge in solar investments, and over the last 2 years Germany’s solar manufacturing industry has been all but obliterated. So much for the green dream. – See more at No Tricks Zone. […]

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