The expansion of wind energy on land has plummeted in the first nine months of the current year. By the end of September, according to an analysis of the Wind Energy Agency on land only 147 new plants with a capacity of 504 megawatts were registered.
This corresponds to only 18 percent of the performance, which has been added on average over the past five years in the same period, it says in the investigation, the SPIEGEL.
If you take off the 68 larger wind turbines, which were demolished in the same period, you get net even only on 79 turbines with a capacity of 419 megawatts, writes study author Jürgen Quentin.
In mathematical terms, this does not even match the output of two medium-sized coal-fired power plants. The information is provisional and could change slightly.
In the city states of Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen as well as in the Saarland, according to the analysis in 2019, no wind turbine ever went into operation; in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse and Saxony there were only two.
The slump is likely to continue: For the permits for new plants have fallen according to the analysis in comparison to the five-year average by 47 percent. In total, therefore, only 304 new plants with an output of 1162 megawatts were approved by the end of September.
The number of permits has also been declining sharply since 2017. Since it often takes several years from the approval to the construction of a wind turbine, the expansion of wind energy in sight is likely to remain rather low.
The faltering expansion is in contradiction to the plans of the federal government to cover at least 65 percent of German electricity consumption by renewable energies by 2030 - above all through wind energy on land, the most important green energy source so far.
According to the Climate Protection Program, which was adopted on Wednesday in the Cabinet, the federal government wants to increase the installed capacity of wind energy by 2030 by 14 to 18 gigawatts. According to Quentin, this is hardly possible with the current expansion strategy.
"The industry suffers from cumbersome, excessive bureaucratic specifications in the approval process," says the energy expert. "In addition, there is a lack of space for new wind turbines."
Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier (CDU) would now loosen some restrictions on wind energy. "In the climate package, however, at the same time there are new conditions, which additionally burden the expansion," says Quentin.
According to the climate package, wind turbines in the future will have to cover a total of 1,000 meters distance to housing estates in the whole of Germany - unless individual countries and municipalities explicitly set shorter distances.
This topic comes from the new SPIEGEL magazine - available at the kiosk from Saturday morning and every Friday at SPIEGEL + and in the digital magazine edition.
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