Wind Energy Encounters Problems & Resistance in Germany

Speigel Online International, July 13

In the early days, when everyone was still very excited about clean wind power, some farmers in northerly coastal areas allowed turbines to be erected even 250 meters from their cottages. And then they received large compensation payments when the noise from the rotors triggered stampedes in their pigsties.

But now even those in northern Germany are grumbling. Many old wind turbines are being replaced with new, more powerful ones in a process known as “repowering.” Instead of 50 meters tall, these new turbines are more than 150 meters high, have flashing lights on them to prevent aircraft from hitting them and make a lot of noise as they rotate.

The result? Complaints about the noise everywhere.

The victims of this “sound pollution” typically have bags under their eyes and a tremor in their voices. They are the movement’s martyrs. Klaus Zeltwanger is one such victim. He lives just 370 meters from the turbine in Husarenhof. “It whirrs and it hisses,” he says, “and then it drones like an airplane about to take off.”

To date, the courts have rejected such complaints. Since wind turbines enjoy special rights, fighting them in court is an uphill battle.

But one woman brought a successful case in the northwestern city of Münster back in 2006. She lived just 270 meters away from a wind turbine. She based her plea on the “requirement to be considerate,” under which technical equipment and machines cannot be located so close to a residential property that they become “visually oppressive.” The experts talk of a “feeling of being dwarfed.”

After a long battle, she won the case — and the giant turbine was torn down,

Other legal grounds can also apply. According to the German Emission Control Act, noise levels in mixed-use residential areas may not exceed 45 decibels at night. For a long time, no one knew what that meant exactly in terms of distance in meters.

Now the courts have ruled on this, too, in a case that might just upset Germany’s entire energy revolution. A woman from Marxheim, a town in western Bavaria, brought a case in the Munich Higher Regional Court. Her typical farmer’s house, decorated with flowers, was situated 850 meters from an Enercon E-82. She claimed that the sound waves boomed “across field and forest” to where she lived.

The case documents talk of “hissing,” “whizzing” and “puffing noises.” A specialist in acoustics recorded a volume of 42.8 decibels, adding a further 3 decibels to this because of what is known as the “impulsiveness” of the noise.

The result? The wind turbine now has to operate at a reduced speed between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., which renders it unprofitable.

Enercon is appealing to the Federal Administrative Court. But its chances of winning look slim. Hundreds of propellers are located in the zone that has now been deemed forbidden. Could a large-scale thinning out of turbines now be in the cards?

Attorney Armin Brauns from Diessen, in Bavaria, is predicting a “wave of cases,” and his office is overflowing with case files. “Some local authorities behave unfairly with respect to protecting the countryside, circumventing existing laws,” he says.

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