The federal government's current wind power expansion plans are huge.

A few months ago, Werner Nohl summed up the fundamental objections to landscape aesthetics and cultural-sociological aspects (FAZ, March 10).

From a practical point of view, however, it may help to visit regions where – especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine with its energy policy consequences – there are allegedly no alternatives, which is why Federal Minister Robert Habeck is striving for a kind of ecological emergency legislation and with an “overriding public interest”. previously justified interventions in the landscape images are already a reality today.

Anyone who wants to glimpse a possible future for the German cultural landscape can do so at the Uckermark motorway junction in north-eastern Brandenburg.

One may doubt the energetic sustainability of the wind power fields covering all horizons there on any weak wind day;

but not because of its visual violence, which is inevitable in both calm and storm and actually “sustainably” shapes the landscape.

A little off the A 20, 246 wind turbines could be seen with the naked eye in spring between the western Pomeranian village of Brietzig and its neighboring Uckermark municipality of Werbelow.

It doesn't have to be the latest, because the scene is dynamic.

The current buzzword is “repowering”, i.e. replacing existing systems with new, more effective ones, but first of all: higher ones.

The Danish company Vestas is currently testing a prototype with heights of up to 280 meters for offshore use - higher than any skyscraper in Germany.

However, according to current planning documents, systems with a maximum total height of 230 meters are also planned in the Uckermark-Western Pomeranian border area that was just mentioned, which would at least exceed the height of the prominent sphere of the Berlin TV tower.

Each of these wind turbines would be the second tallest structure in the federal capital.

Visible 60 kilometers away

During sailing training you learn how far objects are visible before they disappear behind the horizon due to the curvature of the earth.

For the 200 meters that are currently used as the reference value for the relevant approval procedures and that should roughly correspond to the current "repowering" average, that's about 60 kilometers - calculated for an eye level of two meters.

If the viewer climbs 30 meters upwards, this range of vision increases to 75 kilometers.

Of course, these are theoretical values.

However, this example makes it clear that where a range of hills blocks the view of the wind-power-barred horizon, you can see all the more of it from above.

The visual consequences of such landscape transformations in the Anthropocene, even before the wind energy boom, can be experienced, for example, in the city triangle between Cologne, Aachen and Mönchengladbach.

Here the pits of the Rhenish lignite mining area not only gutted the earth's surface in depth and also deformed it upwards through the associated heaps;

but outside of built-up areas, the river valleys and residual forests, there are not too many visible areas from which one cannot see at least one of the four monumental large power plants in the region - Weisweiler, Niederaußem, Neurath and Frimmersdorf, which has since been shut down - or at least their exhaust steam plumes.

The same can be seen if you go all the way east from the deep west of the country, from the mountain ranges south of Bautzen,