Some speak of terror towers that cost peace, strength and nature.

For others, wind turbines have long been part of the landscape.

If you look around the North Frisian coast, for example, you will see wind turbines in abundance.

But despite all the expansion, more wind power is needed to meet the government's climate targets.

Christian Geinitz

Business correspondent in Berlin

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Jan Hauser

Editor in Business.

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In order for this plan to succeed at all, Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) wants to speed up all sorts of processes and also restrict species protection: instead of looking at individual animals that can collide with a wind turbine, the protection of the entire population should be decisive. This promises more trouble with environmentalists and raises the question of whether climate protection is crowding out species protection.

At least the new figures for wind power expansion make us somewhat optimistic, even if our efforts are far from enough.

In 2021, 484 onshore wind turbines were built in Germany with a gross installed capacity of 1.9 gigawatts.

The performance was 35 percent more than in the previous year, as determined by the consulting firm Deutsche Wind-Guard on behalf of the German Wind Energy Association BWE and the VDMA Power Systems specialist association.

But the new amounts are completely inadequate to meet the federal government's climate goals and the growing need for green electricity, the three institutions announced on Thursday in Berlin.

Faster procedures

The wind power experts welcome the wind expansion programs planned by the traffic light government and Habeck - especially the plan to use 2 percent of the land area "onshore" in the future. No federal state should be allowed to steal away from this. The right thing to do is to enable more "repowering", i.e. the replacement of old systems with new, more powerful ones. With approval, the intention was to speed up the approval process, reduce distance rules and give priority to the expansion of renewable energies in the weighing of protected interests. The wind power industry also believes it is necessary to simplify heavy-duty transport for transporting components.

The federal states regulate the settlement distances to wind turbines themselves. In Bavaria, these are relatively far. Habeck also wants to reduce the distances to rotating radio beacons and weather radars. If the distances are reduced, there are more potential areas. At the same time, the plants are moving closer to houses and resistance to them is likely to increase. For this year, the associations expect an expansion of 2.3 to 2.7 gigawatts. There are currently more than 28,000 onshore systems in Germany with an output of 56.1 gigawatts.

A species protection test is carried out before every wind turbine.

Above all, birds of prey such as the red kite or the buzzard and bats run the risk of colliding with the rotors.

Basically, large birds with few offspring are more endangered than others.

Whether their risk of death increases significantly must be investigated beforehand.

For the expansion of wind power, however, the question of species protection is only one of several points that can prolong or prevent processes.

It also needs more staff in the authorities, digital processes and standardization in the process.