The Landtag SPD is starting a new attempt to overturn the controversial Bavarian minimum distance rule for wind turbines in court. SPD parliamentary group leader Florian von Brunn announced on Thursday in a current hour in the state parliament that he would file a popular complaint with his parliamentary group colleague Annette Karl at the Bavarian Constitutional Court. “We will not watch how you continue to unconstitutionally slow down and block wind power in Bavaria,” he said to the address of the state government of Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU). That torpedoes climate protection, harms future generations and violates principles that the Federal Constitutional Court formulated in its climate judgment.
Since February 2014, the distance between a wind turbine and residential developments in Bavaria has to be at least ten times (10H) the height – in the case of 200-meter-high systems, that is two kilometers. In order to be able to deviate from this, a municipal council must take an express decision. In May 2016 – well before the Karlsruhe judgment – the Bavarian Constitutional Court confirmed the 10-H rule. Brunn had already threatened the lawsuit in September, based, among other things, on an opinion by the Leipzig environmental law expert Kurt Faßbender, which the state parliament SPD had commissioned. Faßbender comes to the conclusion that the 10-H rule is no longer tenable after the much-noticed climate protection ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court this spring: In view of the central importance of wind energy expansion for the energy transition and for climate protection in Germany as a whole, the 10- H-regulation of a “constitutional reassessment”.
In the ruling, Karlsruhe had obliged the legislature to regulate the reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions for the period after 2030 in more detail in order not to endanger the freedom of future generations through climate-related restrictions. The federal government therefore had to step up on climate protection – the Bundestag passed the law in June. Two other Bavarian SPD politicians want to overturn the 10-H rule before the Federal Constitutional Court: The Bundestag candidates Seija Knorr-Köning and Carolin Wagner – the latter is now in the Bundestag – filed a constitutional complaint there, according to their own statements, shortly before election day.