Lessons from German On-shore wind farm planning

Abstract

China continuously maintains the first place of global wind energy with the national installed capacity of 188GW at the end of 2017, accounting for over 34.8% of the total world capacity. With the continuous increase both in number and height of wind turbines, the spatial planning has the task to provide suitable places for wind farms. Thus the rising demand for good locations is increasingly causing conflicts. The “13th Five-Year-Plan” of China aims to optimize the spatial layout of wind energy, resolving wind curtailment problems in North China and encouraging the construction of distributed, low-speed wind farms in South China for consumer near energy production. The ecological and social impacts caused by wind farms become more prominent in the densely populated areas of South China, which brings challenges to spatial planning and land use coordination. As a pioneer of wind industry, Germany is faced with similar problems and very early paid attention on spatial planning issues like wind farm site selection, environmental protection and land use planning. This paper compares the spatial planning systems of two countries and draws experiences from Germany to optimize the Chinese wind farm planning procedures. Planning principles and specific planning procedures for the integration of wind farm and spatial planning both in regional and local levels will be proposed according to the developing status of China. An on-shore wind farm planning framework will be set up implemented at each planning level, and coordinated with other land use and space functions to ensure the synchronous development of renewable energy and surrounding ecological and human environment.