N-24 (German commercial news) brought up this topic today....that the Greens are reviewing options (within the government) to hinder German states (16 of them) from halting or limiting windmill generators.
To explain this trend....when you go back to the 1980s when wind-generators started up around Germany, they were mostly a phenomenon that was accepted by the public. No one 'cancelled' projects in that first decade or two.
Somewhere around 2000 to 2010.....as the number of wind-generators grew (into the thousands)....people started to develop this anti-wind-generator attitude.
I should note currently, there are about 29,600 on-shore wind-generators in Germany (as of 2020).
This negative attitude? Some of this was based on simply landscape preferences.....folks didn't want to observe a large flat range (miles and miles) where sixteen-odd generators were 'mounted'. Some of the attitude was about placement....folks didn't want a generator within a km or two of their village or farm (the health worry issue). Some of this was based on a fake-scare tactic that taking down forty trees to put up a flat area and three wind-generators...was going to kill birds, mice or other creatures.
So as permits were applied....people stood up at meetings and voiced concerns...a fair number of permits were refused.
Companies were a bit shocked and unprepared for this type of 'fight'.
In my own region, there's been a fight to put up a group (maybe five or six wind-generators) on a hillside.....where at least two-hundred trees would have to be cut. This permit has gone almost nowhere because of local opposition.
The Greens? Well....if you look at the plan to take down nuke-power and coal-power over the next couple of years, then wind-generators have to be increased. They need to halt state and local opposition. They'd like for states just to write enough legislation....to hinder the anti-generator crowd and remove the legal obstacles.
As for the notion 'if-they-fail'? The grid requires x-amount of power, and the system was never designed to be a 100-percent 'clean' grid. This coming year (2022) might be an interesting period to observe legal entanglement creation or worry over the electrical grid.
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