“Here the whole sky is smoke,” the writer Joseph Roth noted as he travelled through the Ruhr, Germany’s old industrial heartland, nearly a century ago. “It hangs in a grey pall over the land that has made it and that continues to make more of it … It is sacrifice, god and priest all at once.”
Today the skies have largely cleared, yet as the war in Ukraine throws another spanner into the works of Germany’s stalling shift to clean energy, the coal-fired plant at Datteln, the largest in the region, will belch smoke for years to come.
The transformation to clean energy has been slowed to a crawl by botched policies, nimbyism, conflicts with conservationists over birds and bats and cheap Russian gas.
The coal-fired plant at Datteln will continue to generate power for years
Last year not a single offshore wind turbine was connected to the grid. The solar industry has been ruined. Permits for onshore wind installations slumped by more than 80 per cent after a change in the tendering rules five years ago, costing up to 60,000 jobs. Bavaria, the largest state by area, approved a total of six new wind turbines in 2021.
Onshore wind is the single biggest source of electricity, providing nearly a third of the country’s requirements. But until now less than 1 per cent of Germany’s area has been allocated for possible wind farms. Robert Habeck, the Green Party energy minister and vice-chancellor, wants to more than double this share.
The hard part will be reforming planning rules so labyrinthine and riddled with openings for opponents of wind power that it takes seven years, on average, to get approval. The obstacles are legion, ranging from military helicopter flight paths to the national weather forecaster’s radars, which are apparently apt to mistake wind farms for storm fronts.
Another is the protection of vulnerable species, which often pits conservationists against environmentalists. From the red kites of Paderborn and the lesser-spotted eagles of the Baltic coast to the pipistrelle bats knocked down by whizzing blades in Saxony on their way from Belarus, there seems to be no shortage of endangered flying animals at risk of a fatal encounter with a turbine.
Over the past decade, Nabu, a conservation charity loosely equivalent to the RSPB, has mounted 45 legal challenges to 240 planned wind installations, mostly with success.
Simon Müller, Germany director at the Agora Energiewende think tank in Berlin, said the rules also provided a pretext for nimbys and climate sceptics to block wind farms. “In some cases, people who are just against wind have been using this route to say, ‘That’s the problem we have with it’, although really it was just a convenient way of getting rid of the projects,” he said.
Nimbyism is a potent force in its own right. Unterleuten, Juli Zeh’s bestselling 2016 novel, later adapted into a television series, vividly depicted the squabbles generated by a proposed wind farm in a fictional Brandenburg village.
It was not far from real life. Hundreds of “citizens’ initiatives” have banded together into an umbrella lobby group called Vernunftkraft (power of reason) that orchestrates the national anti-wind-farm movement. Mindful of these citizens’ votes, local politicians have sometimes stacked the planning laws against wind. Bavaria has a rule that turbines must be separated from the nearest house by a distance of at least ten times their height — which can mean two kilometers.
Obtaining planning permission for new wind turbines takes seven years on average.
Several other states are working on similar restrictions with a minimum distance of one kilometre. In Thuringia, next door to Bavaria, a bill along these lines may soon pass with support from the stridently climate-sceptic far right. The government’s Federal Environment Agency estimated that such regulations could ultimately cost Germany about 40 gigawatts of wind power, enough to save the annual carbon emissions of a country the size of Ireland.
Vladimir Putin’s onslaught in Ukraine has forced Berlin to start urgently trying to wean the country off Russian gas and revive its once-proud renewable sector, dubbed “freedom energy” by Christian Lindner, the finance minister.
At the same time, though, it has been forced to fall back on other fossil fuels, temporarily burning more coal and committing itself to importing large volumes of liquefied natural gas from Qatar and the United States until well into the 2030s.
Habeck recently conceded through gritted teeth that Germany would miss its climate targets this year, and probably in 2023 as well.
It will take a good deal of willpower and creativity for Habeck and his colleagues to shake Germany’s renewables out of their current Dunkelflaute — the “dark doldrums”, when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow.
Müller said: “Onshore wind is the workhorse of the energy transition, because its production is strongest in winter, when Germany needs most of its electricity and most of its energy.
“And it’s been the one that had a deployment peak [for new turbines] in 2017, and then a sharp decline. That not only affected deployment, but also the industry itself.”
Robert Habeck, Green Party energy minister and vice-chancellor, left, wants to double the area of land earmarked for wind turbines and put solar panels on the roof of every new building
Robert Habeck, Green Party energy minister and vice-chancellor, left, wants to double the area of land earmarked for wind turbines and put solar panels on the roof of every new building
He went on: “I think now there’s a growing awareness for this issue: Germany actually did have a strong and vibrant onshore wind industry, but with the very low deployment numbers in the past few years, and with the expansion we need for achieving the climate targets, that’s something that, frankly, needs to be reconstructed again.”
Yet there is evidence of progress too. Habeck wants to give renewable energy top priority in the planning system as a matter of national security. Modern wind turbines are so efficient that fewer are needed to generate the same amount of extra electricity and they can be erected in areas with lower wind speeds.
Self-interest also helps. While some Germans dread the sight of windmills in the landscape, many others are alive to the benefits they bring, such as jobs and funding for councils.
There are also signs that life is returning to the long-moribund German solar industry. A decade ago it led the world, only to be devastated by the withdrawal of state support and a glut of subsidised competition from China.
Germany’s “solar valley” of manufacturers in the eastern city of Bitterfeld is sputtering back into profit, gingered up by Habeck’s proposal to install panels on the roof of virtually every new building. In nearby Dresden, a company called Solarwatt has invested €100 million (£86 million) in three new factories.
Offshore wind is also much in demand, although the lag times are so long that it may not produce much additional power until the second half of the decade. “A crucial thing to understand about Germany is that parts of German heavy industry … have gone through a really seminal shift in the way that they view climate neutrality,” Müller said.
“In the past they claimed that strict [emissions] reduction targets would risk jeopardising industry. This has shifted to, ‘We must become climate-neutral otherwise we will jeopardise our competitive position globally, and the government must facilitate that also by providing sufficient renewable electricity’.”
Germany’s tortuous “energy turnaround” is likely to go through a few more twists in the coming years but Muller did not hesitate when asked whether his country would hit its renewables targets by 2030: “Yes.” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/…/nimbys-and-bird-lovers…
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