'Isolate the 10%' | How one developer tackled wind power's most aggressive critics

The war in Ukraine has also boosted the approval of renewable energy projects in general as Europe’s largest economy tries to get rid of its previous dependence on Russian energy imports, Andreas Hornig, head of project development services at BayWa r.e. Wind said, pointing to a recent opinion poll on the acceptance of wind power by the Forsa surveying institute that was commissioned by wind agency FA Wind.

According to the survey in late 2022, 82% of Germans see wind energy expansion as important, which likely indicates acceptance, up from 79% in 2020, while only 7% think it is not important. Asked whether they would take part in a demonstration against a wind farm in their area, 12% of those polled said ‘yes’, while 86% said ‘no’. Twenty-four per cent would demonstrate in favour of a wind farm close by.

The poll more or less reflects Hornig’s own observations, who said there are typically around 10% of locals expressing themselves in favour of a wind project, while another 10% are “very loudly” against it. But the overwhelming majority of around 80% are in principle in favour, but mostly keep to themselves, a group Hornig calls the “silent majority”.

“When we are talking about acceptance, we do not only talk about participation,” Hornig said. “The bigger part is communication. … You have to reach these 80%. … You can only convince them with communication.”

The main problem is that wind's opponents are not only vociferous but also increasingly well-organised in their campaigns to scare people off wind power.

“They are very good at search engine optimisation,” Hornig added.

“If the first thing local residents near wind projects find on Google is: ‘I don't get any money for my house, my kids will get ill and I will die,” they will most likely reject the project, Hornig reckoned.

“It is our task to talk to people with facts-based information. And this is a very important point right at the beginning of the project.”

In earlier days, BayWa r.e. organised large town hall-style meetings, where an expert projected a PowerPoint presentation on a wall with a beamer, an approach that has proven to be increasingly ineffective.

While many locals don’t want to talk in front of a hundred other people, aggressive wind opponents in such a setting “could easily conquer the stage,” Hornig said.

“They are very loud. They stand up after questions and drive the whole discussion their way, destroying our approach.

“That is why we changed this, so they don't have a stage anymore.”

Instead, the developer has switched to a so-called ‘marketplace’ concept with several 'info points' for issues ranging from noise or shadow casting to nature conservation and participation. Those events most of the time are held in a large restaurant or other inside location, but can also be organised on an actual marketplace between fruit stands.

“At each station, there's an expert explaining the issues,” Hornig said. “You can go from station to station, talk to the people, talk to the expert. … You can discuss facts and explain in a quiet and casual situation.”

Aggressive wind opponents sometimes still try to disrupt the meetings, “but it's very easy to isolate them, to bring them into the corner. You always need a person to talk to them and to isolate them,” he added.

While anti-wind groups in earlier years stressed the issue of 'infrasound' that they claimed would harm the health of nearby residents, that discussion “is gone,” Hornig claimed, after former energy minister Peter Altmaier gave an interview in which he explained that the infrasound assumption was based on a study containing a calculation error.

“It's very easy to say: ‘Look at look at the interview with Mr Altmaier!”

Arguments are changing, however, and opponents now erroneously claim that wind power itself is responsible for climate change, based on a Harvard study cited out of context, which found that wind farms could cause local and regional surface warming.

The authors of the study had emphasised, however, that this had nothing to do with global warming. In contrast to fossil power plants, such systems do not add heat to the atmosphere, but only ensure a different distribution, a fact anti-wind groups ignore, probably intentionally.

“It's ridiculous. The arguments are most of the time the same,” Hornig said, adding that there is no use in trying to convince the anti-wind activists as their arguments aren’t based on facts.

“You have to isolate them, not to convince them. You won't convince them. Because we are not talking about arguments here – we are talking about ideology. It’s a waste of time.”

AI in the picture

The ‘marketplace’ concept and isolation of obnoxious anti-wind opponents in a corner has been rather successful, Hornig said.

He points to a project near Eberbach in the Odenwald forest region that is not very well known for wind energy.

“A lot of people hate wind energy there. We had a Bürgerentscheid (local referendum) there.”

Next to information events called ‘energy dialogues’ that in this case were co-organised by the state of Baden-Württemberg, BayWa r.e. in the Odenwald region also worked with an augmented reality app developed by Swiss visualisation expert Echtzeit that works on smartphones or tablets.

“You can walk outside, and it looks as if the turbines are there. Because they are projected onto your phone.”

“We used this augmented reality app and invited people and said: ‘Tell us where you think it looks worse, and from where’. They informed us about those sites. Then we made an excursion to exactly those sites with the app, and people said ‘Oh, it doesn't look as bad as I expected’. And we won the referendum.”

Financial incentives

Community participation in the form of money can also help.

Germany in one of the last revisions of its Renewable Energies Act (EEG) had given developers the possibility to grant municipalities €0.002/kWh from a wind project.

“We do it in every project. We are talking about [roughly] €20,000 per turbine and year for the community. This helped a lot because people can work with the money.”

BayWa r.e. public relations official Felix Gmelin added: “It helps to push projects [through] because municipalities themselves see the benefit they get out of” a project.

“Before [the change in legislation], they could not participate in that way.”

An example of how financial participation (next to dialogue) has probably helped get a project approved is the Langenbrander Höhe wind farm in the Black Forest, which initially met with a lot of opposition.

BayWa r.e. not only involved municipalities and local residents early on in the decision-making process but also included a crowd-funding initiative for it that gave locals the possibility to lend small amounts of money to the company at a set interest rate. Residents living close to the wind farm that is slated to be commissioned at the beginning of next year on top of that will get a 10% discount on their power bills from their local electricity provider.

While financial participation can help, using the right information strategies is even more important, Hornig insisted, though.

BayWa r.e. has built more than 700MW of onshore wind energy capacity in Germany, and more than 1.7GW in Europe. Its domestic wind power pipeline is 3GW in Germany, and 8GW in Europe. The developer has a portfolio of another 2.5GW of offshore wind in Europe.