URK, Netherlands — On an outcrop near the lighthouse in Urk, a woman in stone perpetually scans the horizon for the fishing fleet returning home. To the dismay of townspeople, her view may soon be obscured by some of the world’s tallest wind turbines.
In eco-friendly Netherlands where windmills are embedded in the culture, it may seem strange that a spat over wind power threatens to land in the country’s highest court.
But these turbines are a far cry from the squat fourbladed mills used for centuries to drain the swamps and create new land from the sea. They are giants, with gray metallic blades that will scrape the clouds at 650 feet - and residents have said they’ll destroy a way of life.
“They are the highest buildings in Holland,” said Leen van Loosen, Urk’s undertaker who is campaigning to stop the project. “It’s just crazy.”
As wind turbines sprout up across Europe - and increasingly off its coastlines - tussles between energy developers and opponents are increasingly common. In the United States, too, wind-farm proposals often face determined defiance, most famously the Cape Wind project off Cape Cod that took 10 years to win approval.
But oil prices again are toying with $100 a barrel, with Europe’s Brent crude benchmark already above that figure. Global concerns are mounting over climate change. Electricity from wind, solar and other renewable sources is seen by many as the long-term answer to those problems.
Among those emerging resources, wind is the cheapest, and its technology is well-developed.
Last year alone almost 10,000 megawatts of windpower capacity was installed in the European Union, lifting the EU’s total to 84,000 megawatts, or nearly 10 percent of the EU’s power generation, the European Wind Energy Association said ina report this month. Worldwide, wind capacity grew by nearly 36,000 megawatts last year, or 22.5 percent - nearly half of it in China, said the Brussels-based Global WindEnergy Council.
But if the Dutch can’t learn to love wind power, what hope is there for the world to adopt it as a major energy source?
“In Holland, there’s hardly any project that doesn’t get delayed,” said Michiel Muller, the wind unit manager of Ecofys, a research and consultancy firm on sustainable energy, who is not connected with the Urk project.
Across Europe, each installation faces a slew of hurdles, starting from the required Environmental Impact Assessment to regulatory approvals often by more than a dozen authorities. It takes an average of 55 months to wade through the bureaucratic tangle before work can begin, the wind energy association said.
Of about 200 wind-energy projects studied in 2007-08 in Europe, 40 percent were ensnared in lawsuits, and 30 percent more faced slowdowns because of local resistance or questioning from nonprofit environmental groups, the association said. It had no figures on how many projects were killed before they got started.
With 430 megawatts of capacity, the wind park near Urk, population 18,000, would provide enough electricity for 400,000 homes and rank among Europe’s largest. It would help the Netherlands as it races to catch up with the stiff target set by the European Union to generate 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. The Dutch now have a capacity of 2,237 megawatts from wind - far short of its 12,000 megawatt national target for 2020.
The 86 turbines near Urk are to be erected in three rows, 38 on land and 48 offshore. The first will be a mile from the statue of the fisherman’s wife, a 1986 monument on the north side of town that is encircled by plaques with the names of hundreds of Urk’s fishermen lost at sea since 1717.
Residents have cited a long list of dangers from the wind park, including harm to fishing and tourism. The tranquil panorama of the local lake will be disrupted, the town will tremble with the constant rumbling noise of blades, birds will be traumatized, and the whole project could undermine a dike that is to host turbines, they have said.
“We are all for green energy,” said van Loosen, “but this is out of proportion.”
Advocates have dismissed such concerns as misinformation, saying the turbines will be far enough from the town that they will not be heard and barely will be seen. One of their leaders said the modern mills simply follow a hallowed Dutch tradition.
“Windmills belong to the Netherlands,” said Janneke Wijnia-Lemstra, who represents the farmers behind the privately financed project. Government subsidies will guarantee a competitive price for the energy produced.
While the focus today is turbines, they’re not the only target of Dutch resistance to environmental projects. Hostility by the citizens of Barendrecht killed a proposal in 2009 to bury carbon dioxide under their town that would have been siphoned from a Royal Dutch Shell refinery in nearby Rotterdam.
Instead, the plan for the experimental project wasshifted to the more sparsely populated north of the country, but it has now run into equally fierce protests from villagers there. The government has said it will decide in a few weeks whether to go ahead.
Economics Minister Maxime Verhagen said the Urk wind project, set to go up 55 miles northeast of Amsterdam, fits with the energy mix that the Netherlands needs, and that every energy source has a down side.
“You could say ‘no’ to wind energy because it will spoil the view. You can say ‘no’ to nuclear energy because of the waste. And you can say ‘no’ to coal as well - leaving us with no energy at all in the Netherlands,” he told Dutch television when asked about Urk’s revolt.
After eliminating seven turbines from the plan, the government signed off on the wind farm last month - 12 years after it was first proposed. The town said it won’t back down unless another 15 turbines are ditched, and has vowed to appeal to the Council of State, the country’s highest court, and possibly to European courts.
Business, Pages 19 on 02/21/2011