If you happened upon a hotspot of German wind power generation, you'd recognize some of the wheeling and dealing.
Visible activities include:
Elderly ladies going door to door to collect signatures under a petition against yet more wind turbines in the once unspoilt, rugged forest.
Wind power developers going farm to farm to sign up land.
Engineers with canary yellow hard hats poking around in the woods or in the fields.
Scientists conducting an inventory of protected species, measurements of water tables, soil density and type.
Kilometers of over sized load trucks with dazzling amber flashies on the freeways in the middle of the night bringing the huge pick-up-sticks set to the site [for the paranoid: that's not under cover of darkness, it is the only way to prevent terminal clogging of transportation arteries during the day].
All very ordinary, you find all of these in the context of any major project of public importance.
Our hilltop county produces more electricity than its inhabitants and its industry consume, prompting us to call our new way of life "living in an open air power plant".
The voices saying 'enough now' have been getting support in recent years, and all major candidates in the upcoming regional elections are assuring the electorate they 'share this view'. Which means there will be more turbines...
Conflicts between towns as a result of land ownership decisions made hundreds of years ago by some bishop or feudal lord are at the heart of many lawsuits against wind parks. Some towns found that the few acres of worthless brush land they somehow owned, squeezed between two hamlets on a remote hill were ideal for a wind park and pressed ahead with planning. While there are several levels of authorization before a wind mill goes up, the most important one is approval by the town, an attractive proposition if the town owns the land. Unlucky hamlets do at times end up with 200 m high windmills just a foot over the legal minimum distance away -- they get the night time swosh swosh of the blades, the hypnotizing blink blink of red aircraft warning lights and not a single cent from the operation.
Other towns find they have the perfect real estate but it is protected as a nature reserve or water catchment area, and their neighbors do not share the wind fall.
Yet others have become so desperate for tax revenue that they seem willing to bend the rules.
Recently, two such cases made headlines here, and both involved endangered birds nesting near proposed wind farms. Endangered species have the same effect on wind farm planners as a holy cross on vampires: some wailing, then it's over.
In both cases, the official surveyors failed to find nests of an endangered hawk species, large birds, not some sparrow sized flapper.
Environmental non-profits did find them, and permits were denied.
In a rare display of emotions, which some interpret as a sign of the thoroughness of the official survey of endangered species, the mayor of one of the towns blurted out: It's a pair of birds! Without the wind mills, the town is not able to get some of the public works done.
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