Wind power heats things up in Garching. In view of the global political situation, the Greens are urging the city to make more rapid progress in expanding wind power. The city council faction has applied for the land use plan to be changed and additional areas to be set aside for wind energy. But that is going too fast for Mayor Dietmar Gruchmann (SPD) and the majority of the city council. The proposal by the Greens should therefore first be discussed professionally and in detail in the building committee. The proposed area is primarily areas south of the Schleissheim Canal and west of the A9 motorway, some of which have so far been cultivated by Dirnismaningen farmers.
According to the mayor, the city should initially concentrate on the wind turbine that the Ostwind company from Regensburg wants to build to the west of the research site. For the facility, which is to be up to 250 meters high, the Garching city council launched a specific development plan in January 2021 – as the first municipality in the district, as Gruchman emphasizes. But now the process has been delayed. As the Garching city administration explains, the district office has so far denied the investor Ostwind the decision on the compatibility of the project with aviation law; The location of the wind turbine is not far from Oberschleißheim Airport, from which, among other things, the police helicopter squadron takes off. Ostwind is now in dialogue with the district office. The investor is confident of being able to solve the questions – “but that just takes time,” explained the Garchinger building authority manager Klaus Zettl in the city council.
In any case, the negative preliminary decision has meant that the necessary species protection investigations have not yet begun. This will probably delay further proceedings by a year. If the planning and approval process went well, Ostwind had previously not expected the facility to go into operation until 2025 at the earliest. In view of the feared delay, spokesman for the Greens parliamentary group, Hans-Peter Adolf, called for facts to be created as quickly as possible for possible further wind turbines. He referred to the consequences of a changed climate, which can also be felt in the district, such as forest damage due to prolonged drought or flooding.
In the city council, however, the opinion prevailed that, before further area determinations were made, there should be a discussion and that the experiences from the current process with the first wind turbine should be used. Gruchmann also pointed out that the Bavarian governing party CSU has now at least made a gentle change in its wind power policy and has weakened the previously applicable 10H regulation: in priority areas for wind power, wind turbines will only have to have a minimum distance of 1000 meters from residential buildings in future. However, this is likely to have a greater impact in Lower Bavaria than in the densely populated region around Munich. Municipalities, if they want to circumvent the 10H restriction, still have the instrument that Garching used: to draw up a concrete development plan for wind turbines in priority or reserved areas.