Try building an ordinary house in some of these landscapes and see how far you get. Yet a machine hundreds of feet tall, together with the infrastructure required to build and service it, is treated as something altogether different.

And infrastructure there must be. Germany's own Federal Agency for Nature Conservation acknowledges that constructing wind farms in forests requires clearing woodland for the turbines and their access, with the possibility of destroying habitats used by woodpeckers, owls, bats and other species. It also warns that birds and bats using the airspace above the canopy may be injured or killed by the blades.

Energy has to come from somewhere, its defenders say, and every form of producing it imposes costs.

But that is precisely the point. Wind power has somehow escaped the moral vocabulary we apply to almost every other form of development. Its costs are routinely described as unfortunate side effects of an overriding environmental good. The landscape itself has become expendable in order to save the environment.

An Aerial Slaughter of Birds

The birds might reasonably object, one imagines, if only they could speak.

Germany has one of the most detailed official records in Europe of birds found killed at wind turbines. The latest compilation from Brandenburg's State Bird Conservation Center, updated in February this year, contains 831 reported red kite collision victims in Germany and 846 common buzzards. That is more than 1,600 birds killed, often dying slowly from broken wings or backs. The red kite is particularly significant because Germany holds an exceptionally large proportion of the world's population.

Consider also the white-tailed eagle, one of Europe's most magnificent birds. The same official German compilation lists 334 white-tailed eagles reported as wind turbine collision victims in Germany, 122 of them in Brandenburg.

The Brandenburg data is more remarkable still. Among documented white-tailed-eagle losses in the state, wind turbines accounted for 8.8% in the long period from 1990 to 2013. Looking at 2008–13, the figure was 16.7%. It rose to 23.1% in 2014–19 and, among 169 recorded eagle losses between 2020 and 2025, 33.1% were wind turbine victims. These are proportions of recorded losses, not a claim that turbines kill a third of all Brandenburg eagles. But they hardly support the idea that the problem is imaginary.

Nor is Germany unique. At the famous Smøla wind farm in Norway, the German official review records 116 dead white-tailed eagles between 2005 and 2021; by November 2023 the recorded total had reached 140.

There is a curious hierarchy at work here. Kill a protected eagle yourself and the full force of conservation law may descend upon you. Build a windmill to kill them, and you are a good guy.

Then there is the sea.

At Sea, an Acoustic Terror Haunts Porpoises

Germany intends to increase offshore wind capacity to at least 30 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, 40 GW by 2035 and 70 GW by 2045. The law again declares the construction of offshore wind to be in the overriding public interest.

From the land, offshore wind appears wonderfully tidy. Put the turbines far enough out and much of the electorate cannot see them. Unfortunately, harbour porpoises do not vote.

Germany's Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) describes the effect of offshore wind construction on marine mammals – particularly the harbour porpoise – as one of the most serious impacts associated with building offshore turbines. The problem is pile driving. Hammering enormous foundations into the seabed generates intense impulsive underwater noise. Germany consequently imposes a limit of 160 decibels at 750 m from the piling site, a limit which the agency says requires extensive noise-reduction measures to meet.

Without sufficient sound mitigation, the effects are measurable astonishingly far away. The BfN says pile-driving impulses can cause stress and behavioral reactions at distances exceeding 20 km, prompting porpoises to flee their normal habitat. At closer ranges, excessive noise can impair hearing, interfere with feeding, obscure their acoustic communication and, at sufficiently intense exposure, cause serious injury.

The Great Wind Farm Umbrella

And now there is another potential consequence, one which would have sounded rather eccentric only a few years ago: wind farms may change the weather.

On 12 August this year, researchers published a fascinating study in Communications Earth & Environment, modeling what could happen as offshore wind expands dramatically across the North Sea.

Turbines extract kinetic energy from moving air and produce enormous wakes. They alter wind speed, turbulence, vertical mixing, heat and moisture exchange. Observations have already found offshore turbine wakes extending 50–70 km in stable atmospheric conditions.

The new study modeled wind farm development at 2023 levels, projected 2030 development and a much larger post-2050 technical scenario across the north-west European shelf. At 2023 and 2030 scales, the simulated effect on rainfall was small and mostly confined to the sea. But under the very large future scenario, something striking happened.

Rainfall increased over the wind farm areas – and decreased downwind over parts of the coast.

In north-western Schleswig-Holstein and coastal Lower Saxony, the model produced rainfall reductions of approximately 5–8 mm per month, or 5–8%. Across some coastal regions of Germany, the Netherlands and Britain, the reductions became larger, while parts of Jutland saw still greater effects. Under prevailing south-westerly winds, the turbines altered vertical air movement and moisture transport: more precipitation fell over the wind farms, leaving less moisture to travel toward land.

Europe is proposing to turn the North Sea into one of the largest energy-production zones on Earth. The North Sea countries are now contemplating offshore wind on an immense scale; Germany alone is planning 70 GW by 2045. Yet scientists are only beginning to investigate what extracting energy from the lower atmosphere on such a scale might do to atmospheric circulation, moisture and rainfall.

Destroying Nature to Save It?

For decades, environmental politics taught us a sensible principle: large industrial interventions in nature can have unintended consequences.

Strangely, when the industrial intervention consists of wind turbines, that instinct often disappears.

On land, we can see the change immediately: forests opened for access roads, hills and ridgelines transformed by machinery, protected landscapes subjected to development that would be difficult to imagine for almost any other purpose.

Above them fly red kites, buzzards and eagles whose collisions are recorded by the hundred.

Beyond the coast are porpoises inhabiting an acoustic world into which construction sends hammer blows for kilometers.

And now there is at least credible scientific evidence that a sufficiently industrialized North Sea could even redistribute rainfall between sea and land.

Perhaps all these costs are worth paying. Perhaps some are and some are not. Perhaps better siting, quieter construction, turbine shutdown systems, larger exclusion zones and less aggressive development could reduce them considerably.

But those are environmental questions.

The great irony of the energy transition is that asking them increasingly sounds like environmental heresy.