'Just Not in Our Neighborhood'

There's been this effort over the past decade to introduce more and more wind turbines....to produce 'green-energy' and reduce the nuke-coal contribution to the German grid.  Well.....here's the simple truth....the wind-flow throughout Germany DOES NOT give perfect opportunities for wind generation (same deal for solar).  So you end up doing studies and find valleys and hillsides where wind-flow is higher.

This week, the Regional Assembly for South Hessen (the authority to grant permission for areas for wind-generators) made an announcement and granted authority to proceed on with 121 new priority areas for wind turbines.  Location?  A triangle-like area between the Taunus region, Spessart and Odenwald Mountain area.

This set off a fair amount of hostility with the anti-turbine crowd.  Yes, along with the anti-nuke, the anti-coal, and the anti-solar crowd.....there is a anti-wind-turbine crowd.

Their arguments?  They always start off with the turbines being unsightly. They tend to mean that you have a hillside where a turbine 'farm' has been erected....maybe a dozen generators in view.....and that it spoils their view of the valley.  A good example of this is the hillside overlooking Mainz, and you now have around forty such wind-generators in the background.

The second argument is that they cause potential water contamination.  What usually happens when you have permission to place the wind generator....you get a rough area of twenty acres and you remove all the trees to place your dozen-odd wind-generators.  You pour around a dozen concrete pads which go down into the Earth around three or four meters (to stabilize the pole).  The accusation is that this MIGHT cause contamination.  So far, I haven't seen any scientific evidence to prove the idea but it keeps coming up as a potential source. 

Then we come to species protection.  In this case, there is absolute evidence of birds being attracted to the rotating blades, and getting 'whacked'.  You can question the maintenance guys who show up daily to check the generator and blades.....they all carry a plastic bag and pick up dead birds.  It might be two or three around each wind-generator, so you can do a statistical display of 500 to 1,000 dead birds per each generator, for each year.  They might have a point about this, and no one has ever sat and asked the question over why the blades attract birds (I suspect the wind flow might be driving cause).

So via the court system, these anti-wind-generator groups are challenging the authority on this, and hoping to stop expansion.  The problem though....if you really bog down this whole drive to put up more wind-generators (and assume the same for the solar generators), then this idea of dumping nuke-power and coal-power.....won't occur.  The attitude by the anti-folks?  They want more wind-generators.....but they should be put out in rural non-valley areas (where there is no wind). 

It's an odd problem and not likely to go away.