Germany's Giant Windmills Are Unpopular
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
First: With a population of about 2m and as part of former East Germany, Thüringen is _hardly_ representative of Germany (pop 83m). That's less than 2.5% of the population.
Second: In Bavaria the Green party did quite well (2nd strongest in 2018); and in Germany as a whole it does too. Edit: In Hessen (Germany's most populous state) state the Green party was the 2nd strongest as well.
Third: I'm pretty sure windmills are not among the major reasons for the popularity of the AfD.
My friend did one to Dortmund. We had completely different experiences in just about every way.
Dortmund is a large cosmopolitan city in the former West Germany. My friend was on exchange at a Gymnasium[2] so most of the kids he hung out with were college-bound.
I was in a town (small enough that I'll omit the name) that was about as rural as you get in the former East Germany. I literally met every 15-19 year old that lived in the town. I don't know if they nearly all showed up to the parties normally, or if it was just because an American was there.
I picked up a very strong accent while I was there; most noticeably the "ch", which, in "proper" German is a breathy sound made from the back of the throat, was pronounced more or less like the english "sh" sound. Also the "u" sound is pronounced much more closely to the ü sound; to the point where I couldn't tell the difference at conversational speeds (but I did learn to speak them differently: schwul is a not particularly nice slang term for homosexual, schwül means muggy).
In Thueringen, the schools were very heavily tracked[1] from a very young age, and since there was no gymnasium[2] in the town, there was only one teenager in the entire town planning to go to University. After a week of me living in Germany, she was the only person I met who spoke English significantly better than I spoke German (and no, I didn't speak German very well, which caused lots of communication problems).
In Dortmund, my friend was commonly asked "Why are you learning German? Everyone in Germany speaks English just fine!" Even when I visited areas closer to Erfurt (the capital of the Thueringen region), I often got "Gott sei dank, du kannst Deutsch" (Thank God, you can speak German). This was exaggerated by the fact that even well-educated adults would have been encouraged to learn Russian as their primary foreign language rather than English in the DDR.
At the time, there was also a lot of social tension between the West and East. In Thueringen, it was a complicated relationship, because a lot of people had a sudden windfall when their DDR Marks were converted to Deutchemarks on a 2:1 basis (much better than the open-market rate). They were thankful for the West doing this, but also felt like the Wessit (westerners) looked down on them as lesser and in need of improving.
On my flight back to the US, I sat next to someone from the Frankfurt area, and once I mentioned where I had been living, he went on about how the Ossit (Easterners) were lazy, but it's not their fault because they were raised under a regime where work was not rewarded &c. My friend who went to Dortmund confirmed that this was a not uncommon thing to hear when asking people what they felt about the reunification[3]
I am by no means conservative, but to this day I get the same icky feeling when I hear coastal Democrats say similarly condescending things about poor red state voters voting "against their own interests."
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany)
3: German reunification, the upcoming Euro currency, and the ongoing World Cup (until Germany lost to Croatia) were some suggested conversation starters to get us speaking German more, so both my friend and I asked people about those things.
How do you explain that drop then?
Every time surveys are done you get a vast majority (here's a recent one [1]) stating that they support more wind energy.
Sure, it's not like there is no space, but you have to compete with other land use, and it should be sufficiently windy. The cost/benefit ratio drops.
Bloomberg and Forbes are largely not very informative "platforms".
I really wonder what causes this split among people, why do some people not mind at all and other people mind so much when they are looking at the same things.
Plus Massachusetts. (generally has trouble getting anything done.)
[1]https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1462962/cape-wind-r...
Source: am a big fan of renewables, don't mind seeing windmills, but know and visit 'green' people who live near them. Nobody near them loves them, no matter how 'green' they aspire to be.
Of course, offshore makes the whole sound problem go away. I've seen plenty of near-shore farms, big stacks of the things laid out in a grid, and they are not even bad looking.
The law requires the windmills to be build at least 200m from homes, but in this case, the law was simply ignored and a permit was given, to reach some green target.
The windmill owner suggested they sell their house (to who?) and move.
But there are plenty comparable situations. Here an article from a family living in a situation allowed by law: at most 30h per year in the shadow which turns out to be 30 minutes per day while they are eating. They made a youtube movie.
I wonder if older ones were louder?
I presume that's something which has been optimised away with newer designs?
It's not 'a couple' it's a considerable amount of them, and though you might not mind, it's not entirely unreasonable that those who live in those communities might mind.
As for wind mills I'm all for having many of them.
It's ridiculous. No one hates renewables generally, anywhere, this is largely a propaganda item being pushed by big oil. Bloomberg should show some leadership instead.
Cue last weeks study in which offshore wind farm development even in only the select windiest stretches of global coastline provide over 30 trillion megawatt hours, aka about 10 trillion more than projected demand for next year or the year after, I forget which.
Cue Mark Carney, governor of Bank of England saying that the companies that don't adapt to the climate crisis fast enough will go bankrupt, as it will cost increasingly more the longer one waits. He also suggested, vis-a-vis the current state of the global economy and downturn concerns trade war etc, that this is actually the PERFECT time to invest in Green New Deals everywhere, lot's of investment, big projects, now, keep that balloon open and use that momentum to effect the necessary change NOW!
I think this is more reflective of your acquaintances than society than society at large. There is a large contingent of people who really don't want windmills anywhere near them. I've met them in person and heard the complaints. None of them worked for big oil.
German polls suggest that the population is very supportive of the energy transition, so it seems oddly anti-populist to take such a position.
Which suggests they're probably getting funded by fossil fuel interests and/or Russia.
edit: took about two minutes