Smiles all round! Setback Ruling, worth raising a Stein or 3.
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A couple of weeks back we ran a story on the Bavarian government’s new mandatory setback rule (10 times the height: 10-H) which, with turbines towering 200m, means a minimum distance of 2km from homes. In closely settled Bavaria that rule spells the end for hundreds of proposed projects; and, coupled with the German government’s recently imposed cap on new wind power capacity, the beginning of the end for the wind industry in Bavaria and beyond.
In a ‘time-for-Stein’ moment, the Bavarian High Court has just held in favour of, no doubt, delighted Bavarians that the 10-H rule is constitutional.
Major Blow To Wind Power … Bavaria’s Highest Court Upholds 10H Rule! Shoots Down Industrialization Of Idyllic Landscape
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
9 May 2016
Environmental sanity prevails
Bavaria’s highest constitutional court (Verfassungsgerichtshof) has just upheld the southern German state’s hotly contested 10 H wind turbine permitting rule which has been in effect since February 2014.
The Court ruled that the requirement is indeed constitutional. Full story here.
The ruling represents a major landmark victory for wind energy opponents, who have been increasingly shocked by the rampant destruction of Germany’s countryside and natural landscape. They greeted the ruling with loud cheers.
Major setback for Big Wind
The Court’s decision marks a huge setback for the German wind industry, climate protection activists, and for the Germany’s once highly touted Energiewende as a whole.
The Bavaraian Green party reacted angrily to the Court’s ruling. According to BR24 leading Green Party official Eike Hallitzky tweeted:
10H remains amok energy policy. Us Greens are going to continue fighting for climate protection. With all our might!
Wind turbine proponents were hoping to erect up to 4000 wind turbines in Bavaria, one of the country’s most fabled and idyllic regions and home to world renowned sights such as the Neuschwanstein Castle (see above).
The Court’s ruling sends a crystal clear message to the rest of the country, and to Europe: People have had it with watching their landscape being ruined today in order to maybe theoretically protect the climate of the year 2100.
After more than 2 years of legal battling, the Bavarian high court’s ruling was awaited with uncharacteristically high suspense from both proponents and opponents of wind energy. Wind energy supporters insisted the 10 H regulation violated the law.
Over the past months wind projects across Germany have been met with increasingly fierce opposition.
Under the 10 H rule, wind parks can be installed only if they have a minimum distance that is ten times the turbine’s height away from residential homes. That means a 200-meter tall turbine needs to be at least 2 kilometers away from the nearest residential area before it can be approved.
In Bavaria that would make the construction of most wind park projects virtually impossible.
German public broadcasting SAT1 BAYERN here wrote yesterday:
The opponents are not in any way old nuclear power protesters. Among the environmentalists there is bitter discourse, as the price for clean wind energy is the total industrialization of the landscape. […] . In densely populated Germany, open views of natural scenery are becoming rare. For this reason some CSU parliamentarians in the state parliament find the love for wind parks by the Greens rather peculiar.
Germany has some 26,000 turbines in operation producing some 85 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually – which is less than the country’s remaining 8 nuclear power plants. SAT1 writes that wind turbines “are also no efficient form of energy generation, as a glance at the power business shows.”
SAT1 adds that without subsidies, most turbines would not even turn a profit.
In total Germany already pays out about 25 billion euros annually in subsidies for green energy. Nevertheless CO2 emissions have not dropped in 7 years. In other words: well over 100 billion euros have bought nothing.
SAT1 concludes on wind energy in Bavaria:
Clean energy supply with today’s technology is incompatible with the landscape that took 2000 years to form.
Higher still? Nearer still? So NO!
About stopthesethings
STOP THESE THINGS 
This is interesting we live just over 2klm from the nearest turbines at Bungendore but we have a hill and bush between us. Yes I can hear the turbines when directly facing us west but not the infra sound. I think all turbines should be pulled down and used as scrap. These companies such as Capital (infigen) should have to pay big time for the trauma they cause not only to humans but fauna/flora destroyed. I blame the farmers as they should be less greedy and use their land in a sustainable way. By not overstocking. Julie Gray
The Infrasound and Low frequency emitted by these turbines has been ignored by the Health authorities here in Australia and others around the world, it affects Humans to the extent to save their sanity an health they cannot remain in their own homes without having to abandon them either for short periods or permanently, thus failing to protect those they are meant to ensure the health and safety off.
Likewise the EPBC has failed in its duty to protect the environment for the Fauna and Flora which exists in environments ‘chosen’ to have these turbines installed.
They have failed to take into account and insist on mandatory testing of Industrial Wind Turbines complete noise/sound/sensations emissions.
How many endangered and common creatures have been damaged by the LFIS from these things, how much of our environment and eco-systems have become places of agony and death.
Recently I read an Abstract of ‘Wind Turbines cause chronic stress in Badgers (Meles Meles) in Great Britain’, Published in Journal of Wildlife Diseases, the authors Roseanne C.N Agnew et al, used the badgers cortisol levels to assess the stress levels of Badgers living 1km out to 10km from turbines.
When are we going to see research into the effects on Humans and other creatures.
Steven Coopers study at Cape Bridgewater identified a unique signature being emitted from the turbines, when will authorities start to accept they have a duty of care to ensure the safety of all and not JUST THE FINANCIAL SUCCESS OF IWT COMPANIES, these turbines are doing nothing to save the earth.
To insist on Scientific Research before they do anything to prevent more harm is to ensure the dangers so clearly present are allowed to expand – they have forgotten the first priority is to do no harm – to meet this priority they need to call a halt to the expansion of IWT’s and to shut down those where reports of harm have been made UNTIL the research has been completed – yes it may take years but so what – if they continue as they are and eventually reach the truth and find they have destroyed far more than these turbines could ever have theoretically saved what then – how will they return peoples health, the environment and all those creatures that have become extinct – JUST TO KEEP THE MONEY FLOWING INTO THE POCKETS OF THE GREEDY INDUSTRIALISTS WHO CARE FOR NOTHING BUT THEIR PERSONAL AGRANDISEMENT.
I agree.
I live 4.6 Kilometers from the nearest turbine and Infra sound is making my life a misery. Both in my house and workplace at times for me intolerable. I am aware of people badly affected at 10 kilometers. Also I have felt on many occasions, lying down in my water bed, and with feet resting on a work table and on a hard couch, seismic vibrations at approx. 3 cycles per second. One day some politician will stand in parliament and apologise for the torture inflicted on rural residents. Hopefully those that gave it to us, and those that could have stopped it will watch this apology on their television in the crow bar Hilton.
Devil in the detail. In Scotland we have a similar guideline but rarely followed as the definition of residential area is interpreted as a city and not a village/hamlet or individual homes by both the developers and more often than not the Planning officers. In the Highlands where most homes are in dispersed communities the 2km rule is seldom followed in detail.
A setback distance of 10xH is no set back at all. Perhaps it will smother the audible noise to a degree so it is not “heard” but it can’t eliminate the underlying infra and low frequency sounds – the ones that are doing the serious damage.
For my wife and I, the set back distance needs to be 40Km +.
It has been that way since the turbines started up on our farm. It just took some time to verify the distance needed by repeated absences from the turbines noting the distance and the sensations.
When are people going to realise that the wind weasels are pulling the wool over their eyes by only referencing dBA.
The human (and animal) biology is far more complex than an electronic instrument. Electronic instruments don’t get nauseous, don’t get headaches, don’t suffer panic attacks, etc… but humans do! It is about time the public realised that we are not BSing.
And to think at the start of this raving stupidity that is wind power, I actually thought turbines were wonderful.
There is nothing like a bit of personal experience to open ones eyes.