Dr. Christoph Schwahn
Dieser Beitrag wurde von mir als eines der "Bellagio Papers" verfaßt und öffnete mir den Zutritt zu einem internationalen Expertengremium, welches vom 1. bis 10. Juli 1998 im Studien- und Konferenzzentrum der Rockefeller-Stiftung in Bellagio am Comer See zum Thema "Wind energy and the Landscape" zusammentraf. Ich habe bislang noch nicht die Zeit gefunden, den direkt in englischer Sprache verfaßten Aufsatz ins Deutsche zu übersetzen. Bemühen Sie Ihre Sprachkenntnisse, vielleicht lohnt es sich! Der Aufsatz gibt übrigens meine sehr persönliche Meinung wieder, mit der ich in dem Windenergie überwiegend sehr befürwortenden Expertenkreis überraschend positive Resonanz fand.
Erst im Januar 2002 sind die Ergebnisse der Tagung in den USA erscheinen: "Wind Power in View", Academic Press.
Abstract
It is quite a contradiction that the exploitation of wind energy seems to be supported by nearly everyone while there is at the same time a large public objection as soon as words are transformed into action. To explain this phenomenon by simple ´NIMBY´ effect which occurs in nearly every public planning process may be a simplification, but there is little use in a democracy where decisions are pluralistic. A more constructive way of getting at the problem is to find out what the opponents are motivated by.
Landscape protection reasons can be identified as a main group amongst the arguments against wind energy projects. It may be helpful to know the reasons for landscape protection and the principal aims of it.
Landscape protection needs landscape planning. As the landscape is continuously changing through human activity, as long as mankind is alive it can not be conserved. However, as Man is the only being capable of learning from the past, anticipating the future and developing ethical standards, landscape planning should be the duty of responsible human action towards his environment, towards nature and towards all creatures.
As every decision is prepared by an evaluation, landscape planning needs landscape evaluation as well. The evaluation of esthetic matters is quite delicate because esthetical perception is entirely subjective . However, landscape analysis can be very helpful in the decision on where to erect wind turbines and where not.
It is an illusion to believe that the exploitation of wind energy has no secondary effects. Everybody can see, hear and feel them but not everybody is happy about them. However, this is precisely the particular advantage of wind energy: everything is perceptible, nothing is hidden. Wind energy policy should therefore take advantage of this fact, arguing and acting straight and open. Doing so, the advocats of wind energy should point out that the percentage of wind energy in the total amount of electricity can not only be increased by erecting more turbines, but also and even more efficiently by reducing the general consumption of electricity. By its esthetical power, wind energy offers the chance of a general change in energy politics.
Public objection against German wind energy policy
In Germany, public discussion about how to generate electricity has quite a long tradition. Several focal subjects were discussed consecutively.
The discussion about nuclear power started in the early seventies. It was not a mere discussion but temporarily became a war like situation when buildings of nuclear power plants (i.e. Brokdorf and Grohnde) turned into battlegrounds of a civil war: thousands of policemen with tanks and helicopters faced thousands of demonstrants.
The public discussion about nuclear power was followed by the discussion on the dying forests because of acid rain. It was scientifically proved that the production of electric energy from hard coal was one of its main reasons. However, public discussion soon headed mostly against individual car traffic. In Germany, the production of hard coal is largely supported by government funds in order to maintain jobs, and the government is not particularly fond of a public discussion about whether it makes sense to produce electricity from coal or not.
Next came the discussion about the changes in the global climate, which resulted in a policy to reduce CO² emission by different acts of legislation.
Until 1991, wind energy played no important role in public discussion because there hardly were any projects. This seems contradictory in the context of a permanent and violent debate about energy politics, and indeed, it is. While in other countries, like Denmark, the development and erection of wind turbines had started long ago, nearly nothing similar took place in Germany. After the failure of GROWIAN, a governmental research project on a gigantic wind turbine, no one on the official side still believed in the possibility of wind energy because it did not fit into the German system of central production of electricity.
When technical progress in Denmark became visible to the public mind, a change was made by act of government in 1991, turning the economical circumstances of wind power plants by a new electricity feed law, which guarantees wind turbine operators a price of nearly 90 % of the retail price. Furthermore, very interesting public grants and subsidies were given to investors in wind turbines. In the beginning, the ministry of environment of Schleswig-Holstein made advertising calculations telling farmers and land owners that a credit of one hundred per cent of the total investment in a wind turbine would be amortized within ten years.
This change seemed to be very radical. At least the esthetical consequences on certain landscapes, especially the marshes along the North Sea coastline, could lead to this impression. The differences in public attitude towards wind energy that followed could be called radical as well. A journalist in Northern Germany called it ´Goldgräberstimmung´ (goldrush atmosphere), another created the term of ´Windrausch (windrush) to describe what was going on. This can be indicative of several attitudes:
1. Wind energy has to deal with money and wind generators could be regarded as money maker, sponsored by the government. In spite of the long energy debate before 1991, there had been nearly no „alternative“, free lanced attempts to develop new technologies before the launch of the governmental wind energy programs.
2. The rush: quick development without a sufficient state of the art. Today, a 1,5 MW turbine is as efficient as 10 turbines of the first generation - the impact of the latter on the landscape is much more important. Also, the planning process which had to deal with the question about where to erect wind turbines and where not was methodically very poor and differed from one local authority (Landkreis) to another.
3. The term of ´Windrausch´ is subtle and can hardly be translated. ´Rauschen´ is the German word for ´to rush´ which is used in the same way as in English: it describes the noise ´the wind is rushing´. However, the substantive ´Rausch´ in German means drunkenness or a state of being ´high´. ´Windrausch´ could be understood as an intermediate state, created by some politicians in preparation of the next elections. Possibly they also intended to make their electors drunk by a short term program for wind energy.
To me, it seems typical that the public discussion which followed the changes in northern landscapes took quite extreme positions with a high rate of moral statements. As nuclear power and coal had proved their negative consequences, nobody could afford to object against alternative forms of making electricity in general as well as against particular projects of their implementation without being overrun by the wind energy lobby as well as by the government.
In the heat of the debate about the change in energy politics, the growing conflict between environmental protection and landscape protection was neglected for some time, and even suppressed by the officials. The Lower Saxonian minister of environment, Monika Griefahn, did not allow the results of a workshop on the placement of wind turbines into the landscape to be published immediately but held them back for quite a while. Also, she required a map of Lower-Saxon environmental administration, which showed restriction zones for wind energy because of seabird breeding reserves, to be revised before being published. These actions did, of course, rather accelerate the discussion about the need for landscape protection than stop it. Some nature protection societies, like the BUND, pointed out their different attitude towards wind energy implementation as well as the permanent need for a general change in energy politics.
Indeed, there has not been a real change in German policy towards electricity generation. In 1992, the government published the project of seven new nuclear power plants. Public demands for equal electricity tariffs for everybody to prevent waste of electricity by big customers was not successful. Although the need for exploitation of renewal energy forms is constantly repeated by the officials, the use of renewal energies still seems to be rather complementary than an alternative to conventional energy policy. In spite of public wind energy programs, wind energy is, with a percentage of less than one, no serious factor in the total amount of production (or should I say, consumption) of energy in Germany. There is no visible hope for an instant change. Anyway, a principle of government policy may have become more transparent by over-use: to do something in a different direction without changing the general heading. The dogs are barking, as our present chancellor says, but the caravan goes on.
In this context, the opposition against the spreading of wind energy converters all over the country can not be simplified as a simple NIMBY Effect in the understanding of a nowaday phenomenon towards any public project. Things are, indeed, more specific and complicated.
When people have a bad conscience, they usually do not like to think too much about it. If they are concerned by the threat of a change, just the opposite happens: they start to think about everything possible.
In Germany as well as in most western countries, people tend to have a bad conscience about environmental destruction, caused by their so called needs for life standard. In spite of this, there is no tendency towards a change in the elements of western life standard. This fact leads to quite a lot of contradictions. Aviation, for example, has a very bad public reputation in Germany. In spite of the fact that there have been civil war like battles similar to the ´nuclear´ ones about the construction of a new runway at Frankfurt Airport, the number of flights to and from Germany has increased dramatically. Last year in a local newspaper a member of the political ecological party „DIE GRÜNEN“ (the greens) in the Göttingen council boasted that by chance during his holidays in New Zealand he met another Göttingen councillor . A small world by changing places, bought with a lot of fossile energy.
To get along with a contradiction, people tend to have easy solutions which may be slightly wrong. During our project of esthetic landscape evaluation for wind turbines in the Wesermarsch region we asked tourists about their attitude towards wind energy and found out that a lot of them were convinced that wind energy ´´is a good thing because it can replace the use of nuclear power´´. The results of the questioning lead us to the rather cynical conclusion that ´´wind energy is good, because everybody can have the feeling that the energy he is actually consuming is made of wind and not of nukes´´.
It is no public secret in Germany that the market for wind energy is not (yet?) part of a balanced public market but largely dependent on public subsidies. The big power companies have pointed out that they have been forced to offer tariffs to ´green´ energy producers which, in comparison to conventional production, seems much too high to them, and they made complaints. Some time ago a sentence has in one case confirmed the present policy of the energy feed law, but in the same time pointed out the need for a different solution.
So, at least in the mind of the local authorities I had to work with, wind energy has a ´taste´ of instability (because of its dependence from public subsidies as well as from a legislation which one day may be skipped by sentence). Public policy is changing rapidly all the time as politicians rule from election to election and nobody enjoys the idea of being the victim of short term policy. Recently, there has been a change in planning legislation, which aims at facilitating the planning process for wind power plants. Most of local authorities try to ´´sit that out´´ (as one has learned to say in Germany), develop their own policies to slow things down, hoping for a change in the years to come.
On the remote isle of Foula in the Shetlands, people were used to having to start a noisy diesel generator before switching on the washing machine. Then the Shetland council employed a very smart energy support, consisting of a wind turbine, a water basin on the hill for energy storage and a diesel generator in case of need. Although the landscape scenery is unique, nobody objected against the project and today everybody is proud of the new system and tries his / her best to keep the consumption of electricity at a low level. Wind energy is crucial there, and everybody can see that. That is the difference to Germany.
Reasons for Landscape protection and planning
As landscape is our source for material, energy and food, human activity has always had an influence upon its face. Most landscapes can therefore be considered as permanently altering memorials of human civilization. As long as men are living on Earth, Landscape can not be prevented from being changed.
However, the landscape change caused by industrial civilization has been dramatic compared to previous changes. The history of industrial civilization during the last 150 years shows that man tends to be euphorical about new technologies, forgetting or neglecting that they are always connected with undesired secondary effects. Landscape is a witness of this development. In many regions of the world, agricultural and forestry development have changed it completely, which has raised a lot of ecological and esthetical problems. Agricultural development, however, led to overproduction and, in spite of everything, most farmers in Europe still have low level incomes if they manage to survive at all.
Man is the only being on earth that is able to anticipate as well as to draw conclusions from the past. Further, man is the only being on earth able to develop ethical standards. As a consequence of ecological damage by land exploitation the knowledge has grown that man does not only endanger other living species on this planet but also himself. Thus, our knowledge about ecological connections requires thorough landscape planning to prepare responsible and sensible action with respect to all natural ressources. The restrictive way in which landscape planning often acts is surely a reaction on the fact that negative effects of technical progress have been neglected for long periods of time, and as a reaction on the speed of today´s landscape change.
Landscape protection has also been the result of some painful losses. A part of the earth´s surface is not only landscape or environment but also ´Heimat´, the homeland of the people who live there. As they have a certain idea of their homeland, people can be expulsed without leaving it. They are simply not able to follow the change of the esthetical circumstances they are used to because things take place too quickly for them. Unfortunately, this esthetical conflict has not been taken very serious yet because it is a subjective factor. This may also be a reason why the people who are concerned more and more tend to object against wind power projects. But they don´t dare to say: I don´t feel at home any longer, because it doesn´t look like my home any longer. They point out that birds may be endangered, that the amount of electricity produced by wind energy is ridiculous compared to conventional electricity production, that there is danger by flying airfoils and so on. It seems to be typical for Germany as well as for other western societies that there have been quite a lot of efforts to find out the consequences of wind turbines on animals but in relation to that, little research was done on the consequences for people. What I would like to report now, was rather an exception: a study about the esthetical requirements for the placement of wind turbines in the landscape. I have done it together with Jürgen Hasse in 1992 for the regional council of the Landkreis Wesermarsch, situated between the Weser mouth and the Jade Bay in northern Germany.
Placement into landscape
The general esthetical problem of wind energy converters raises from the fact that they have to be erected on exposed places free from high vegetation. Thus, the natural potential for visual impact is already high. Together with the height of the tower, the visual impact on the landscape is totally unavoidable. This fact requires careful site planning and careful shaping of the turbines and their sites.
Rational actions are always prepared by evaluations. Even intuition includes some kind of unconscious evaluation. Design is sometimes made by intuition, but an intuitive decision can only be made by an individual. However, democratic decisions are not individual ones, and so in the decision process the relevant criteria must be known and accepted by a larger group of responsables. This is why systematic evaluation has its place in democratic planning.
In German landscape planning, systematic evaluations of landscape qualities are made for different purposes:
As I mentioned before, esthetical evaluation has a specific problem. Evaluations are usually meant to be objective, but esthetical reception and evaluation is entirely subjective. However, this can not mean that esthetical aspects are inferior. Everyone has material needs like food, energy and building material. And everyone has ideal values like love, identity, and beauty. Of course, their importance varies individually. But this is the case with material needs as well, as a comparison of life standards in western societies and developing countries indicates. So, as a conclusion, we will have to accept that esthetical values like beauty, variety and individuality of a landscape may be individually valuated and are thus subjective, but they are definitely vital. Trying to objectivize landscape esthetics will be as useless as measuring a lot of water with a foot rule.
However, it can be extremely useful to analyze the landscape parameters for esthetical reception. The marshes of Friesland along the North Sea Coast are extremely flat and could be called monotonous by someone who is not used to this special kind of landscape. For myself, without a systematic landscape analysis I would have been lost in trying to localize differences in landscape structures. It was quite interesting for us to find out that the landscape units which were a result of our analysis corresponded with different epochs of marsh formation.
An analysis of this kind is quite easy but requires a lot of work and travelling. First one should try to get an overall view of the concerned area, i.e. by a quick travel through all its parts. Doing so, you should fix the criteria for the analysis, because they may differ from one type of landscape to another. In doing so, it is useful to differentiate between short-, mid- and long-ranges of human perception.
Most of the relevant esthetical criteria are dependent on time. Time of day, time of year and, of course, the weather have an influence on the criteria as well as on their perception. On the other hand, the change of criteria makes time perceptible. Timing a landscape analysis can be quite important, and sometimes it has to be repeated at a different time because conditions are quite different then.
A crucial criterion for the impact of wind turbines is the length of vision. It is relevant for the isolation of spaces from which a turbine can be seen. The analysis of different lenghts of vision will lead to principal axises and fields of vision which are relevant for the experience of a landscape and the visual shed from which a future turbine can be seen.
Vertical structures of a landscape can limit the vision and divide a landscape into different spaces. Hence it is useful to identify barriers of vision and the rooms in between them. Further, these rooms can be characterized by evaluating the rate of vertical structuring. In the marshes of the North Sea Coast, the rate of structuring is important to differentiate landscape spaces and to judge their sensitivity towards visual impacts caused by wind turbines.
Landscape harmony is a crucial point in landscape analysis. Although harmony is subject to individual evaluation, an approach to it can consist in the description of the elements which shape the natural scale of a landscape (i.e. the height of trees) and the elements which make it burst (i.e. towers, wind turbines, harbour cranes, high buildings). Marshes have a relation between vertical and horizontal dimensions which is completely different from the one in mountainous regions. Consequentely, in the marshes a hangar with a large ground surface but little height may create a less important esthetical impact than a tall tower or a wind turbine.
A criterion of big importance in flat landscapes is the horizon. It can be compared with silhouette lines in mountainous regions. However, the horizon of a flat landscape has a bigger share in perception because in the mountains silhouettes permanently change with regard to the place of perception. A marsh landscape changes very slowly when you travel through it, unless you do not travel with high speed. To illustrate this, I cite a common saying in Germany: In the marshes you can see today who will come to visit you the day after tomorrow.
Horizon can not be immediately evaluated but has to be described. How much of it is visible? Is the line sharp or blurred? Is it broken by vertical elements, and how is their character? These vertical elements are often landmarks and have to be localized and described as well. Formerly, the highest vertical structures in the marshes were church towers. Together with lighthouses, in earlier times of navigation they were used by the coastal sailors as orientation marks. Even today, the value of landmarks can be estimated especially in the marshes because there are no high peaks to climb in the need for orientation and the sky is often cloudy with no sun helping to guess at the directions.
As marshes are completely man-made, the landmarks are man-made as well. However, most of them are accompanied by trees. As in the Weser marshes there are not many historical windmills left, all buildings of historical settlements are embedded in trees or big bushes, planted as a protection against the constantly blowing wind. Although put into landscape by Man, these natural elements have forms which are always interpreted as ´natural´ forms. This leads to the point of landscape interpretation: everything in a landscape tells something. Although this must be understood by the individual and is therefore subjective as well, there are many common understandings. No doubt about the character of a tree as a natural element in a landscape. A church tower will always be understood as an element of historical culture, and a harbour crane, high tension mast or a wind turbine are elements of technical civilization (although with time going on one day some of them might be elements of historical culture as well). To describe what a landscape is telling, it is necessary to localize these elements of different meanings. Then it will be relatively easy to estimate a possible change in landscape expression caused by the addition of new elements like wind turbines.
Elements of technical civilization are very often standardized in their outfit. The more of them are placed into landscape, the less is the landmark effect. Because of standardization, wind generators can be very annoying in the marshes: formerly people could distinguish every church tower telling the name of the place. Today, wherever you look you always see the turning triblades. The inflation of standardized elements like high tension masts and wind generators puts down orientation and contributes to the former landscape standardization caused by industrial agriculture. Especially in touristic regions like the North Sea Coast this fact has to be taken into consideration.
However, the mixing of different kinds of wind turbines can raise esthetical conflicts as well. At least the present state of the art tends to avoid different types of turbines in one wind park. Although I see some need for more specific studies in the shaping of windparks including the attempt to create their own individuality, the most efficient way to avoid landscape standardization by wind energy use is to dedicate some spaces to the generation of electricity by windpower and to keep others clear from turbines.
This decision is indeed a crucial one in site-planning for wind energy. After having done an analysis of landscapes with results in a distinction of different kinds of landscape spaces it is not very difficult to describe those landscapes which have a typical sensitive shape towards visual impacts. In the landscape of the Weser marsh for example, the older marshes are characterized by isolated farms whose buildings are nearly not visible because of the trees around them. The expression of this kind of landscape is harmony between Man and Nature. Some years before 1991, all electric lines have been buried because of the impact into the landscape. It would be contradictory to erect wind turbines after that.
In contrast to them, younger marshes have been shaped by modern agriculture: no hedges, very few trees and long, large fields. In that kind of landscape the change in landscape expression by wind turbines would not be as big as in the first case. Furthermore, near harbours which are dominated by cranes and other industrial buildings there would be little change of landscape expression caused by wind turbines.
It is certain that there will always be a discussion about the prevention or the promotion of wind turbines in special landscapes as interests of different people are always different. However, an esthetical analysis and evaluation of landscape is useful to furnish arguments to the people who have to decide about the future.
Wind energy makes the need for a general change in energy policy perceptible
Just because of its esthetical impact, Wind energy offers a real chance for a change in energy policy. Apart from the energy and resources used for fabrication and destruction, nothing is hidden, everything is visible and audible. There is no doubt about the visual impact on the landscape. There is no doubt about the threat: when you stand right underneath a rotor, you feel and hear the immense power of the turning mass. Seeing, hearing and feeling all this, you learn that electricity has its price, even when it is made out of wind energy. Wind generators can teach people how precious electricity is, and convince them to be conscious about their handling of electricity. However, this requires a direct esthetical link between the places of production and consumption.
Consequently, it makes absolutely no sense to deny the negative effects of the exploitation of wind energy. Propagandists of nuclear power have denied its negative effects for ages. This was easy because all the risks and negative effects of nuclear power are esthetically not perceptible and one needs a very good ability for anticipation as the risks go far beyond everything imaginable. The risks of wind energy, however, can be totally anticipated by nearly everyone. If a risk is known, people can develop policies to meet it. Because negative effects and risks of exploitation of wind energy are clearly limited and not complicated at all, the possibilities of a responsible use are quite easy as well.
Wind energy is an alternative to conventional electricity production. It should show an alternative to conventional electricity consumption as well. Germany is actually the leader of the world in wind energy production, but the share of less than 1 % in total energy consumption indicates a weak point: it is not sufficient to develop new technologies, they should be employed in an intelligent way as well. Unfortunately, Germany seems to be far away from that. Wind energy is presently plugged on a system which was designed to produce heat by large utilization of nuclear power. About nearly 20 years ago, Lower Saxony´s prime minister Ernst Albrecht said that by the year 2000 nearly 50 per cent of Lower Saxony´s houses would be heated electrically. Of course, by the change of electricity policy away from nuclear power this aim will never be achieved, but the general structures have not been changed. Electricity is still produced in the classical centralistic way, rates for big and small consumers are quite different and although nearly every child knows that classical electricity production goes along with a loss of two thirds of the primary energy, producing heat with electricity is still fashionable because it is comfortable in many cases. But even in case of a change in production methods: is it better to have one´s laundry dried in a drier which runs with wind electricity instead of hanging it directly into the wind?
Time is money, and speed is energy. The perceptible comparison of the turning rate of wind rotors with that of the wheels of a high speed train should make people think. The German magazine ´Der Spiegel´ pointed out that 16 wind turbines of 600 kW each will be neccessary to support an ICE Train with electricity . Will the energy that is neccesary to satisfy our need to travel in no time ever be covered by wind energy? It was the decision of Mankind to turn away from the millennium old technology of sailing, being drifted by wind energy with wind speed.
It might appear naïve and idealistic to expect the wind energy lobby to argue towards a reduction of electricity consumption. However, if we call the way nuclear power was promoted „irresponsible“, we have to point out that wind energy is no supplementary energy to conventional, but an alternative, thus it has to be employed in a very different way.
We should make clear that it would be very difficult, and raise many problems, to satisfy our present need for electricity with wind energy. We have to point out that our bad conscience about exploiting the planet can not be calmed by new technologies but by a new and more responsible handling of our so called needs. As Paul Gipe pointed out in his paper, wind energy offers a chance for an efficient help to underdeveloped countries and the knowledge of what wind energy is able to do there can be a feedback to the so called civilized world.
There are two ways of increasing the share of wind energy: to install more turbines all over the country and - to reduce electricity consumption. The policy of the future will be a combination of the two. However, in reference to the actual share of wind energy in Germany it is obvious that the latter policy promises to be more important to reach that aim.
Advocats of wind energy should not be single minded. There is not only wind energy but there are other important forms of renewable energy as well, as the development of solar energy shows. That makes clear that wind energy needs to be embedded in a superior energy concept in which every form of energy can take a position where it is useful.
Energy production is not all. There are further public needs to accept, like the need for a landscape that meets the esthetic needs of the individual. We have to respect this as well and try our best to place wind turbines into the landscape in a responsible, thoughtful way. We have to respect the needs and fears of the people in concern, for electricity network has the effect that the people who profit from electricity are currently not the people who suffer from its production. Berlin for example, which has not a single wind turbine at present, could contribute to an alternative energy system by reducing its consumption dramatically.
As time is very strongly linked to energy, we have to think about our handling of time. Time may b e money, but money is not life. Time can be life, and, indeed, time is life. Take your time to enjoy life quality.
Literature
Schwahn, Christoph: Landschaftsästhetik als Bewertungsproblem. Zur Problematik der Bewertung ästhetischer Qualität von Landschaft als Entscheidungshilfe bei der Planung von landschaftsverändernden Maßnahmen. Beiträge zur räumlichen Planung No. 28, Hannover 1990.
N.N.: Reußenköge wollen Windpark ausweisen. Nordfriesische Nachrichten (Local Newspaper) of January 5th, 1991
N.N.: Windmühlen nur für Einheimische? Nordfriesische Nachrichten, February 26th, 1991
NN: Von der Leine. Göttinger Tageblatt of August 23 th, 1997
Hasse, Jürgen and Christoph Schwahn: Windenergie und Ästhetik der Landschaft; Beispiel Wesermarsch. Interdisziplinäre Studie in drei Teilen, im Auftrag des Landkreises Wesermarsch. Not officially published.
N.N.: Parade der Tüddelmasten. SPIEGEL 39/1995