Germany’s Renewable Energy Dreams Have Been Derailed
On a blazing hot August day on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast, a few hundred tourists skip the beach to visit the “Fascination Offshore Wind” exhibition, held in the port of Mukran at the Arkona wind park. They stand facing the sea, gawking at white fiberglass blades, which at 250 feet are longer than the wingspan of a 747 aircraft. Those blades, they’re told, will soon be spinning atop 60 wind-turbine towers bolted to concrete pilings driven deep into the seabed 20 miles offshore. By early 2019, Arkona is expected to generate 385 megawatts, enough electricity to power 400,000 homes.
“We really would like to give the public an idea of what we are going to do here,” says Silke Steen, a manager at Arkona. “To let them say, ‘Wow, impressive!’”
Had the tourists turned their backs to the sea and faced inland, they would have taken in an equally monumental
