Germany’s new government plans to use 10% of the country’s land for wind turbines – Is it up for that?
German alliance agreement and 2% target for wind energy
By Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(Text translated/edited by P. Gosselin)
Following the phasing out of nuclear power by the end of 2023, the alliance agreement aims to bring about phasing out of coal,”Ideally this should be achieved by 2030“.
To achieve this goal, renewable energy will account for more than 80% of electricity production, which will increase from 600 TWh (terawatt hours) today to 680-750 TWh (p.56). While specific power generation targets were named for solar (quadrupling today’s capacity to 200 GW) and for offshore wind (also quadrupling to 30 GW), the agreement refers only to the target for onshore wind energy of a land site. 2% of the country’s surface area.
If we talk about adding another 30,000 turbines – and this can be assumed if the area doubles from 0.9% of the land area now – this will not reduce too well in the rural areas. village.
But is the 2% area really accurate? It’s just not as accurate as the 0.9% figure for today’s land area. This is because the acreage figures in each case refer to the narrowly defined area in Plan B. Necessary distances to residential buildings are not included in this area figure. 0.9% corresponds to 3100 km² today (source: FeEnvironment Agency and Competence Center for Nature Conservation and Energy Transformation).
“1,325 square kilometers and therefore approximately 42 percent of the areas considered – taking into account existing installations as of the end of December 31, 2017 – are free for the installation of wind turbines. ” This means that there were 28,500 turbines per 1800 km² in 2017 (30,000 turbines today). As I said, this is the area of plans B. This area does not include the necessary distance to residential buildings, however, this distance must be in the plan.
If you divide the number of turbines (28,500) by the area (1800 km²), there are 16 turbines/km², which is an average of 62,500 m² or 250 mx 250 m. This shows that the required distance to residential buildings is not enough.
6 times the area
If we calculate the average size of 5 turbines for each wind farm, the wind farm will have an average area of 176,000 m² (420 m x 420 m with 4 wind turbines on the edge and 1 in the middle) without the area. distance area (at a distance of 300 m between turbines). With a distance of 600 m (from the point of view of emission protection, which is problematic) to the nearest residential area, the park needs to have an area of 1020 m x 1020 m = 1.04 km². This is six times the size of the B-Plan site, which is merely nestled around the factory configuration.
Even if one takes into account that today 5% of the turbines are located in the forest (where there is no distance limit) and in the future perhaps 20% will be built in the forest, the required area will be reduced only five times. B-Plan zone.
In other words, those who claim 2% of land with Plan B for wind power plants actually need 10% of the land.
Now it must be admitted that the size and height of the turbines will increase significantly, so we can expect less than 30,000 turbines. That’s right. But the land consumption will still be by order of magnitude, because larger turbines also need to be spaced further apart (5 times the rotor diameter, at 120 m i.e. 600 m spacing).
Furthermore, they need to be at least 1000 meters away from residential areas. Output increased, but so did land consumption. The fact that wind power multiplication does not lead to guaranteed output need not be mentioned again here.
Even windy November shows that wind energy production is often close enough between 0 and 5000 MW, and therefore less than 10% of the possible 60,000 MW output. And 3 times zero is zero.
Source: Rolf Schuster.
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