It‘s not easy being green! – Does wind energy constitute a wickedsocio-environmental problem?CWW 2019 | 27–30 August 2019 | Stirling

Environmental Assessment and Planning Research Group| Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel

Cumulative capacity (new projects)Annual decommissioned capacityAnnual installed capacity (repowering)

Cumulative capacity (repowering)Annual installed capacity (new)

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Is the German Energiewende at the crossroads?

~ 29.200 (52.9 MW) land-based turbines~ 38 % in gross electricity consumption

System change (introducing price-based tendering in 2017)

Limited land/site availability

Increasing conflicts:

conservation concerns

governance gaps

military use /aviation

social acceptance

» Are we on a road to an energy transition stalemate?

Environmental Assessment & Research Group | CWW 2019 | Stirling, 27–30 August 2019 | Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel| 2

Fig. 1: Annual trend in installed wind energy in Germany (Deutsche WindGuard GmbH 2019; legend translated by authors)

Wind-wildlife achievements: What have we achieved?

Radial distances to breeding/resting sites and IBAs [31]

Mortality-risk-indices (MGI [5])

Spatial restrictions

» ‘soft’ vs. ‘hard’ no-go-areas (distances to habitats, species, settlements, military use, radar, water …)

Institutional capacities (BfN, BLWE, FA Wind, KNE,…)

Research achievements

» CWW 2015 Berlin [17]

» Research projects (bat species, red/black kite, black stork, common buzzard, migratory bird species, insects [inter alia 3, 12, 23, 24, 26])

» Wide public and media coverage [cf. 29]

Environmental Assessment & Research Group | CWW 2019 | Stirling, 27–30 August 2019 | Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel| 3

Fig. 2: Excerpt from Helgoländer Papier [31]Fig. 3: Spatial restrictions for wind energy in 10 German federal states [6]

Lost in bias? [29]

After identifying ‘emerging issues’ in 2017 we kept monitoring the topics identified

Slow progress in the aftermath of wind energy horizon scan (cf. CWW 2017, Köppel et al. 2019)

What we understood:

more complex, presumably ‘wicked problems’ [25] (cf. Rittel & Webber (1973)

Environmental Assessment & Research Group | CWW 2019 | Stirling, 27–30 August 2019 | Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel| 4

Fig. 4: ‘Emerging Issues in wind energy development‘ [18]

Ill-defined (imperfect understanding of problem)

Intertwined (one problem is a symptom of another)

Conflicting values of stakeholders

Inherent, persistent uncertainties

Immune to (conventional) solutions

Fig. 5: Characteristics of wicked problems (adapted from [13, 25])

Why are the problems ‘wicked’?

Environmental Assessment & Research Group | CWW 2019 | Stirling, 27–30 August 2019 | Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel| 5

Nonconformities in a pluralistic society:

» SDGs (are multi-faceted, yet pursue often disparate objectives)

» Rural–urban imbalances

» Intergenerational effects

How to tackle the ‘wickedness’?

[cf. 1, 2, 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 22, 27, 28, 30]

Environmental Assessment & Research Group | CWW 2019 | Stirling, 27–30 August 2019 | Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel| 6

Values are part of the problem

Act collaboratively

Need for creativity

Apply systems thinking

No right to be wrong

⇢ utilise swarm intelligence & knowledge from other disciplines

⇢ be aware of one’s own ethical responsibility, also for climate action [4, 28]

⇢ go beyond consensus, i.e. aim for shared understanding & commitment

⇢ identify/implement mitigation action together w/ all stakeholders

⇢ think outside the box‘ & resist ‘conventional‘ solutions

⇢ aim at small but shared wins, use adaptive management

⇢ no isolated action

⇢ rather than play off species conservation vs. climate action, activelystrive for both

⇢ ask ‘Did our solution better the situation?’

⇢ actively work out alternatives when refusing a wind project by proposing alternative sites, repowering potential

Outlook

20002010

• Scholars and practitioners have attained vast knowledge on wind-wildlife-interactions (e.g. fundamental information on species and impacts pertaining to wind farms) [inter alia 3, 5, 11, 12, 17].

2010 2019

• The wind-wildlife community fostered mitigation measures [9–10, 19, 21]; though, proposed solutions often created new and unanticipated problems (e.g. deterrence measures).

20192020

• We want to be part of the solution, not the problem; thus, we pinpoint the ‘wickedness‘ of WE-related issues.

???

• Convergence of wind-wildlife and wind-acceptance communities given their close connection in Socio-Ecological Systems (SES)?

Environmental Assessment & Research Group | CWW 2019 | Stirling, 27–30 August 2019 | Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel| 7

Contact details:

M.Sc. Juliane Biehl

Berlin Institute of Technology

Environmental Assessment & Planning Research Group

juliane.biehl@tu-berlin.de

http://www.umweltpruefung.tu-berlin.de/

Thank you!

Environmental Assessment & Research Group | CWW 2019 | Stirling, 27–30 August 2019 | Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel| 8

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Environmental Assessment & Research Group | CWW 2019 | Stirling, 27–30 August 2019 | Juliane Biehl & Johann Köppel| 9

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