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Not in my front yard: Wind turbines in Germany.
Photo:
imago stock / imago images/Shotshop
On Mother's Day, a stranger decapitated all the tulips in my front yard and disappeared with them.
But I don't want to complain.
After all, there are flowers growing in front of our Munich terraced house and no wind turbines.
Germany is facing a massive expansion of onshore wind energy, the traffic light coalition has agreed on this.
The enthusiasm about it is limited.
Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder spoke of a "real asparagus shock", which many citizens now have to prevent.
Bavaria wants to relax its 10H rule, which stipulates that wind turbines must be at least ten times their height away from residential buildings.
In essence, however, the "Not on my doorstep" principle should endure.
wind power?
No thank you!
Even the Greens in Saxony and Brandenburg think so, and their state government has decided on distance rules based on the Bavarian model.
The joint protest against wind turbines in Thuringia almost led to a taboo-breaking alliance of AfD, CDU and FDP this week.
Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow signaled a willingness to compromise at the last second.
The construction of wind turbines will probably also progress at a snail's pace in his state in the future.
In Munich there are just two wind turbines.
If Habeck's expansion plans, according to which the energy giants are to occupy two percent of Germany's area, were applied to Bavaria's capital, it would actually have to be 15.
The wonderful view from the Oktoberfest Ferris wheel towards the Alps would be gone.
How can the energy transition still succeed?
Perhaps with a trick that in my in-laws' homeland led to people even coming to terms with a nuclear power plant with cracked pipes: money for the community.
When the Neckarwestheim nuclear power plant is shut down in the near future, the people of Neckarwestheim will lose around three million euros in trade tax revenue per year.
Citizens with wind power in their front yard should benefit much more than before from the operation of the systems.
It needs a bonus for saving in the residential area.
Finance Minister Christian Lindner seems to have money, otherwise he would hardly have shelled out more than three billion euros for a tank discount that dies at the petrol pumps like many a poor bird on the rotor blade of a wind turbine.
utopian?
The federal government could at least oblige the operators of wind farms to share the profits with their immediate neighbors and communities.
The Federal Constitutional Court recently declared such a model from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to be permissible.
If the asparagus check were the higher the closer the rotor blades came to the tulip heads in my front yard, I would not only tolerate the construction of a wind turbine on my doorstep.
I'm probably looking forward to it.