Onshore Wind Faces Severe Crisis In Germany

35 new windmills have so far been build in Germany in 2019. Only 6 years ago, in 2012, there were more than 1000 new windmills per year. The onshore wind sector is the most prominent example of a flatlining energy transition and a severe renewable energy crisis, in a country that not long ago took much pride in giving the word `Energiewende´ to the world. A `Wind Summit´ of the German government now tried to revive the sector, but no discernible progress has been made. Windmill producers are criticizing a lack of legal certainty, but also say that `sweet spots´are already taken and NIMBY attitudes are on the rise.


The company Senvion is just one of the latest victims of the current crisis. The German producer of wind turbines filed for insolvency in April 2019, putting more than 200 employees out of work. Usually politicians blame increasing competition from China for sad-stories like this. However, the sector itself, while acknowledging increased competition from all over the world might play a role, is much more concerned with procrastination of allocation-decisions under spatial planning law by municipalities and the Länder. The procrastination reflects an increasing resistance against onshore windmills in Germany. It might be tempting and easy to blame this on a general `conservative backlash´ in German politics. Companies, however, identified a different issue: local resistance.

The impressive extension of onshore windturbines in Germany over the last decade has, inter alia, been made possible by harvesting `low hanging fruits´: windmills were erected close to the shore in scarcely populated parts of the country. But those spots have largely been taken and as windmills are coming closer to population centers, communities are becoming increasingly curious about the dissemination of benefits.

Increasingly critical municipalities are designating ever-less areas for wind-energy onshore as a result. This triggered the German government to invite municipalities and federal government as well as the industry and environmental activists to a `wind summit that ended yesterday 5 September. There are no concrete results of the summit and NGOs afterwards criticized a `lack of will´.

The main topic of the summit has been the streamlining of planning laws. In particular rules on minimum distances between windmills and certain facilities like electric beacons that are important for aviation. While the international standard says that windmills are banned within a radius of 10 kilometers of such facilities, German regulation insists on 15 kilometeres. This has been criticized as outdated. But the issue of obtaining permits in time has also been discussed. While it was possible and common until a couple of years ago to obtain required permits within one year, planning authorities have become increasingly cautious and it can easily take up to three years until permits can be issued.

While the `doldrums´ in onshore wind in Germany have initially been blamed on a new tendering procedure for subsidies, that replaced the old German feed-in tariff system (discussed earlier on this blog), it now becomes clear that factors like spatial planning laws and increasing `NIMBYism´ are just as crucial. This is a severe problem for the energy transition in Germany as a whole, given that a planned massive increase of onshore wind is the backbone of Germany`s strategy to bring green electricity up to 65 per cent of consumption in Germany by 2030, that features in the coalition agreement of the current German government.