An animal parade took place in a grove near Watterdingen in the Konstanz district. A red kite suddenly sits in a buzzard’s nest. The old nest owner probably had to look for a new place to live, and Jörg Dürr-Pucher now has a problem too. He is a project developer for Solarcomplex AG, which wants to set up three wind turbines near the nest. But in contrast to the common buzzard, the red kite is a “breeding bird species at risk of collision” according to the new Federal Nature Conservation Act, which is why the project is now on the brink again.
“We pretend that nature works the way we humans do, and the living conditions have basically always stayed the same,” says Dürr-Pucher. But that is a dynamic process: “Animals fight each other for their homes.” Now a red kite has pulled into the enclosure of the 55-year-old, which is considered the worst possible accident in the wind power industry. This rarely happens around 60 percent of the world’s stocks live in Germany, Baden-Württemberg has recently become more and more popular when it comes to building or stealing nests. And where it occurs, the bird of prey is one of the country’s biggest wind turbine preventers. So far, conservationists and opponents of wind power have used the legal situation to delay the construction of plants for at least years, if not to stop them entirely.
The green-black state government in Stuttgart and the traffic light coalition in Berlin now want to build more and, above all, larger wind turbines. The federal government has set itself the goal of covering 80 percent of electricity consumption with renewable energies by 2030. That’s very ambitious. In the first quarter of this year, renewables provided 47 percent of the electricity demand – and consumption by e-cars and heat pumps is likely to increase in eight years. What is more important now: climate protection or bird protection?
In the EU, every single endangered bird counts
According to the directive of the European Union, endangered species are about the protection of each individual bird. If the risk of killing a white-tailed eagle, tree falcon, eagle owl or red kite is considered “significantly increased” in an infrastructure project, then the building permit will be shaky. The decisive factor here is the distance to breeding sites. However, since nature sometimes does not do what man plans, one often moves in legal gray areas, expert opinion follows expert opinion, courts find it difficult to make decisions. In the district of Reutlingen, it took eight years before the district office approved the construction of five wind turbines in July. The case had been sued by all instances. The Sowitec company is now allowed to build, but to protect the red kite it has to switch off the systems from sunrise to sunset between March 1st and September 15th.
Such conditions are not uncommon, because the red kite is considered to be particularly endangered by wind turbines. When hunting, it flies over the field and looks straight down – to where prey animals like mice and rats are – and not forward. That’s why he doesn’t see the rotors and collides with them. “But we have the shortcoming that the question of how frequent such collisions are has not yet been answered,” says Elke Bruns, deputy director of the Competence Center for Nature Conservation and Energy Transition (KNE) in Berlin. Studies were lacking.
In February appeared in the ZDF program “Frontal” a contribution that particularly alarmed the opponents of wind power. It presented the EU-funded project Life Eurokite First results on the question: What do red kites die of? The team around the Austrian biologist Rainer Raab catches birds and equips them with a GPS transmitter. If a bird dies, a veterinarian determines the cause of death. Red kites are most frequently eaten by natural enemies on the European mainland, illegal poisoning follows in second place ahead of road traffic, power lines, shooting down and rail traffic. Wind turbines only come in seventh.
After the broadcast, the Life Eurokite employees experienced how emotional the debate was. They felt the need to clarifythat these are preliminary results, the final analysis is still ongoing. The team does not want to comment on the subject of wind turbines until the project is completed. So at the end of the year at the earliest.
Elke Bruns from the KNE thinks that the Eurokite study is well on the way to bringing more certainty to the debate. She also finds the attempt by the Grün GmbH planning group in Oldenburg to use lasers to find out how red kites behave in flight to be helpful. The field test has shown that the birds do not avoid the wind turbines, but fly very close to the turbines, but recognize the rotor as a danger area and fly around it. explained managing director Martin Sprötge in the magazine Renewable energy. This supports the theory that collisions are rather random events. However, this investigation is not yet court-proof.
If it turns out that red kites only rarely collide with wind turbines, the Greens in particular should breathe a sigh of relief in politics. For them, the issue is a difficult dilemma to resolve. Because they occupy the climate, economy and environment departments in the federal government, they have to solve the problem themselves. Economics Minister Robert Habeck and Environment Minister Steffi Lemke changed the Federal Nature Conservation Act, which has been in force since July 29, at lightning speed.
There is also a lot of criticism of the new Federal Nature Conservation Act
The core of the change in the law is that more should be done to preserve the population, but the focus is not on the individual bird. Standards now apply to distance rules, in the case of the red kite: no wind turbines within a radius of 500 meters around the nest. There are also two test areas within a radius of 500 to 1200 meters and then 3200 meters. In it, the wind power companies should take measures to reduce the risk of death. Create attractive hunting grounds for the birds roughly in the opposite direction to the windmill. As in Reutlingen, shutdowns can still be ordered during hunting and breeding seasons, as well as the installation of new and expensive camera systems that recognize red kites and switch off the wind turbine when one approaches.
However, there is a passage in the new law that could make much of it obsolete. All of the measures are considered unreasonable for companies if they reduce the yield of their wind turbines by more than six percent. At locations with a lot of wind, it can be up to eight percent.
The Nature Conservation Union (Nabu) practiced sharp criticism, parts of the law are not compatible with EU law and would continue the legal uncertainty. Jörg Dürr-Pucher from Solarcomplex, formerly managing director of Deutsche Umwelthilfe, also believes that the administrative courts will decide whether the new Federal Nature Conservation Act will endure in this form. The question is crucial, especially for Baden-Württemberg. “We deal with the red kite almost everywhere,” he says. It is a mystery why he settles here so often, also in comparison to Bavaria or Saxony, which have a similar landscape.
However, Dürr-Pucher no longer wants to be deterred by the red kite that has arrived near Watterdingen. There was a spirit of optimism in the wind power industry, he reports. He intends to submit the application for approval for the wind farm to the Constance district office before the end of this year.