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The expansion of wind power is faltering – also because of unprocessed applications for heavy transport. Around 150 permits are required in Germany for the transport of a single wind turbine. That takes weeks.
Final preparations, then it finally starts. Kai Westphal, who is responsible for transport at wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, has been waiting for this for twelve weeks. The permits were once again processed very slowly by the authorities. However, the convoy with the three wings, each 80 meters long, urgently needs to be transported from the only German storage port in Cuxhaven to the future location.
A twelve-week delay would result in enormous costs, explains Westphal. Even a day’s delay costs 30,000 euros and more. However, delays in transport are not an isolated case. “The more than 90-meter-long heavy-duty transports usually cannot take the direct route because many roads are too narrow for them or are in poor condition. The convoys cannot avoid roundabouts either. Very few roundabouts in Germany were built with a through lane in the middle.”
Construction workers therefore have to laboriously remove delineators and widen the track with iron plates. Another problem: the convoys are only allowed to drive at night. During the day they need parking spaces. But there are far too few of them.
Germany’s infrastructure is poorly prepared for the huge heavy loads. Conversion measures, huge detours: all of this costs money. Transporting an entire wind turbine can ultimately cost more than a million euros. “And these costs remain with us as a manufacturer. That’s not something we can pass on great, it’s the risk we have to bear.”
Complicated forms, unclear costs, long waiting times
Making the cost risk calculable for the customer – that is one of the tasks of the forwarding company Balmer from Holthusen in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. To do this, the transport professionals inspect every section of the possible route, digitally and personally. The second and no less complex step: obtain the permits.
Up to 60 individual permits are required for a tour. It is not uncommon for these to be 100 pages of forms. If the heavy transport applied for is only a few centimeters longer or shorter on the day of departure or if the weight differs by only a few kilograms, the permit expires immediately. Processing takes an average of twelve weeks.
“We need a much shorter processing time from the authorities, they have to be much faster,” says Marcel Siegel, traffic manager at Balmer. “Sometimes we have to postpone the projects because we don’t get the permits. Just today I had to tell a customer that I won’t be able to drive the project next week because the permits aren’t progressing.”
For comparison: In the Netherlands, such approval procedures take just one to five days. But in Germany, quick procedures fail at the state borders because each federal state has its own regulations.
Streamlining would save 90,000 applications
And even if the permits are there, the transport is still not safe. “We often get the answering machine at night from our drivers: ‘We couldn’t drive, a night-time construction site with a three-meter clearance width’, and nothing is stored in the tools. No office knows about it. And something like that can’t be. How are you supposed to plan then? How should the customers plan?” Siegel asks himself.
The Association of German Mechanical and Plant Engineering (VDMA) has calculated how much could be saved simply by accelerating and streamlining the approval process: around 90,000 applications per year could be dispensed with – that would save up to 70 million euros per year in costs.
The long approval times are now having a massive impact on the goals set by the federal government for the energy transition. In order to achieve the goal of ten megawatts per year, around 2,000 systems would actually have to be set up on land. In 2022, however, there were just over 550 systems with 2.4 megawatts. If the federal government wants to achieve its goal by 2030, around 30,000 heavy transports per year would have to be approved from 2025.
As of today, that is unrealistic. That is why the opposition is worried about energy security. “The federal government has decided: get out of nuclear energy, out of gas. They also want out of power generation. They also no longer want coal. And if the expansion of wind power doesn’t progress quickly enough, then we’ll have a real electricity problem in Germany,” says Christoph Ploß (CDU), a member of the Bundestag’s transport committee. “And then I really fear that this energy policy of the traffic light coalition will give deindustrialization in Germany a good boost.”
Ministry plans new test tool
Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) is responsible for rectifying the permit deficits. His ministry is working towards standardizing permits across national borders. A joint digital application system should remedy the situation. When asked, the ministry said:
Autobahn GmbH is working flat out on the preparations for the introduction of the autobahn’s own testing tool, GST.Autobahn. This is planned for the summer of 2023; After the introduction, a considerable simplification and acceleration of the application processing and a reduction of the backlog can be expected.
“Autobahn GmbH’s new tool is a first small step in the right direction. But it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem,” says Dennis Rendschmidt from the VDMA. “What we actually need instead is a national geographic information system in which all information is stored about construction sites, bridges, load limits, dimensions of motorway exits, rest areas and the like. And if we had this tool, then we would actually see real progress.”
Because then everyone involved in the transport – i.e. authorities, freight forwarders and manufacturers – could check routes for their suitability within minutes. If the regulations were then standardized nationwide, the approvals would probably be available in Germany within days.
It took the convoy from Cuxhaven two nights to reach its destination in Steinburg. Another wind turbine for the energy transition has achieved its goal. Better late than never.