Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The first giant Vestas offshore wind turbine of the German He Dreiht (“It Spins”) project in the North Sea has been installed, some 190 miles northwest of Bremerhaven. It is capable of generating 15 megawatts just on its own. When the other 64 turbines are erected on the already-sunk pilons within the next year, the wind farm will generate nearly 1 gigawatt, enough to power 1.1 million homes — more than the number of households in Houston, Texas (population 2.4 million).
And here’s the thing: it is receiving no government funding. This is a money-making project for the giant German energy firm EnBW. Over 40% of its portfolio is now in renewables, largely wind farms. It already generates about 1 gigawatt of electricity from wind, the nameplate equivalent of a substantial nuclear plant, and He Dreiht will double that. In 2024 alone, EnBW commissioned 635 turbines.
Germany receives 31% of its electricity from wind turbines. In contrast, in 2023 only some 10% of total U.S. utility-scale electricity generation came from wind.
The enormous Vestas V236-15 turbine has a hub height of 142 meters (over 465 feet). With every revolution, the blade sweeps through the equivalent of six football fields!
Although Germans face other pressing crises, including the nearby Ukraine War and a slowing economy, 54%, over half, of the public in a recent opinion poll said that environmental and climate action are “very important.” Two-thirds reported that “increasing periods of extreme heat are already threatening their health, with 85 percent supporting better protection measures against heat waves.” So reports Benjamin Wehrmann at Clean Energy Wire.
Photo of a North Sea wind farm by Jesse De Meulenaere on Unsplash
On the other hand, one piece of bad news is that doomism appears to have taken hold in the German public, so that only about a third of Germans believe that human-produced climate change can still be effectively countered. University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael E. Mann pointed out that fossil fuel companies have switched from denying climate change — which is visible to most people now — to trying to convince the public that it is too late to do anything about it. Of course it isn’t too late! We have a “carbon budget” until 2050, since all the carbon dioxide so far produced will go into the oceans. If we go on putting billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere after 2050, we risk outrunning the absorptive capacity of the oceans, and then the stuff will just stay in the atmosphere for 100,000 years making the earth very hot. So we can in fact fight this, and we have 25 years to get it done. We’ve already reduced the likely temperature hike of the globe from 4º C. by 2021 to 3º C. And it has been shown that the moment we stop producing more CO2, the heating will immediately cease increasing.
Notional Map, likely not to scale, of North Sea and very approximate location of He Dreiht Wind Farm (Yellow Triangle); Digital, Gemini, 2025
The exciting thing for me about He Dreiht is that EnBW as a company is committed to it and to expanding renewables in its portfolio, regardless of what the German public thinks or of what the German government looks like at any one time. EnBW thinks it can make money this way, and EU-wide goals and regulations are a consistent incentive to reduce carbon.
Renewables are in for a hard ride in the US because of the greed of the Republican Party politicians who have rented themselves out to ExxonMobil and Koch enterprises. But some of that hard ride is the withdrawal of the government subsidies for renewables that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. What EnBW is saying is that at least in the EU, huge new renewables projects don’t need government subsidies to be profitable.
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