German NIMBYism: fact and fiction

While the German renewables sector continues to celebrate citizen involvement in the energy transition, the BBC looked hard to find the other side of the story. Today, we take a look at the anecdotal evidence that contradicts the anecdotes told by the British journalist.

Yesterday, I corrected some factual inaccuracies in a recent report at the BBC, but I neglected to include the chart below showing that the first energy co-op did not come about in 2005.

German energy co-ops started in the 1990s and have boomed in the past few years. They allow citizens – even those who do not own property – to invest in the energy transition.

EnergyTransition.de

Also yesterday, German solar organization BSW invited journalists to a press conference along with Germany's Association of Cooperatives next Wednesday, when the latest figures of a survey on energy cooperatives will be presented. The invitation states that "more than 130,000 people already take part in an energy cooperative, and the boom continues."

As I was writing my article yesterday, another report by the same author at the BBC went online, and this one is outright misleading. Instead of coming over to Germany to learn what the country is doing differently – citizens, not energy corporations, driving the switch to renewables – Matt McGrath looked for what he knew from home: NIMBYism.

The article thus reads as though Germany had already filled up all of its ugly landscapes and now had to put up new turbines in the pretty spots: "the majority of the 23,000 wind turbines in the country have been built in the flatter north and eastern parts of the country. But now the focus of expansion is on the picture postcard areas of dark forest and lush green hills in the central and southern areas."

How one German anti-wind campaign mentioned in the BBC article depicts windfarms: a cluttered forest of towers against an otherwise pristine landscape.

Vernunftkraft

As someone who has spent 20 years in the dark forest hills of the Black Forest in the southwest, spent his first two months in Germany in the picturesque town of Marburg (in the state of Hesse, which the article focuses on), but has also visited every one of Germany's 16 states, I can tell you that folks from Dardesheim to Schleswig-Holstein (see this PDF I wrote last year) did not found wind energy cooperatives with their neighbors in the 1990s because they thought their landscapes sucked, so they might as well set up wind turbines. (To see what four of Freiburg's six wind turbines look like, click here. And to see how anti-wind activists in France depicted wind turbines around Mont St. Michel click here.)

States like Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden-Württemberg do not have fewer wind turbines because they are prettier than anywhere else. Rather, there are two reasons: first, better wind conditions in the North; and second, opposition from top state officials to local energy cooperatives. The town of Freiburg, where I live, has six wind turbines, all of which are owned by citizen investors. In an interview with the planner for a movie I am working on (to be released online for free in November), I was told that public acceptance among locals is 75 percent after the first decade of operation.

You would think that locals would be allowed to put up turbines where they want if there is such support, but after (!) two of the windmills had been completed and hooked up to the grid, the state withdrew its building permit – after the fact. All of those citizen investments were in limbo during the court proceedings. The governor at the time was a man named Oettinger, who is now Energy Commissioner of the EU.

In the video below from my upcoming movie, my daughter and I investigate the visual impact of wind turbines, including in the "lush green hills" the BBC mentions.

The wind farm in Dardesheim grows organically, as do practically all community-owned wind farms in Germany. In another interview for the movie, the man behind the wind turbines in nearby Freiamt told me, "we put up two turbines to begin with so people could see what it was like first. If we had told everyone that we were going to put up 10 from the outset, we would not have been able to move forward."

Generally, Germans are sensible, not hysterical people (which is why the charge of "fear of nuclear" makes no sense). When Baden-Württemberg threw out Oettinger’s CDU from power and elected a green governor in 2011, a lot of my friends thought wind power would finally get moving. At dinner one night, three of them expressed their fears. One is a birdwatcher from a nearby winegrowing village; on another, an avid cyclist in the Black Forest; and the third, a man who carries toads across a busy street near his home during their migration season (along with a number of his neighbors). Like many of those quoted in the BBC article, my friends were concerned about the potential impact on the natural world.

They had all already stood under the six wind turbines we have in Freiburg, so I asked them if they had ever seen a dead bird or bat in the area. None had. One of them spoke of "gold diggers" coming in and ruining the landscape. I informed him that, in 2012, Baden-Württemberg remained last (aside from Germany's three city-states), with only nine wind turbines installed for the entire year – a total of just 19 megawatts. As our neighbors in Freiamt demonstrate, Germans who support wind power are not going to move ahead quickly – and not without the support of the great majority.

So much for anecdotes – on Monday, we do a fact check on some of the arguments used by the anti-wind campaigners that the BBC chose to highlight uncritically. (Craig Morris)