Landscape and townscape visual impact assessment for wind turbines and wind farms
Landscape and visual impact assessment for wind turbines shows with visibility analyses and photomontages how wind farms affect landscape and townscape.
Wind turbines change the landscape and townscape, and many residents are concerned about this. With our landscape and townscape assessment, you create transparency and win trust. Our team of experts surveys and assesses the intensities of effect and provides sound decision-making bases for planning and permitting. The impact on residents also includes shadow flicker, which is assessed by the shadow impact assessment for wind turbines. For photovoltaics, there is the landscape and townscape assessment for PV plants. A landscape assessment forms the basis for answering residents' concerns on a factual footing.
In the environmental impact assessment, the landscape is a protected asset in its own right. A tiered approach modelled on the ecological risk analysis is common: the sensitivity of the existing situation and the intensity of the project's intervention are each assessed on four levels from low to very high, and from these the significance of the intervention is derived on five levels. The effectiveness of measures and the remaining effects are then assessed. Whether remaining effects are acceptable or significant is judged on the basis of the assessment method applied and the circumstances of the individual case, and the overall assessment is verbal and argument-based. Existing wind turbines in the surroundings count as existing impact.
For the townscape, the study area is defined on technical grounds based on sight lines, turbine height, terrain and the town centres affected, and the town centres of the settlements within it are assessed individually. For sensitivity, settlement structure, building forms, settlement edges, existing impacts and identity-forming features such as historic buildings or a characteristic silhouette count. For visual disturbance, the foreign-body effect, the space-altering effect, visibility, sight lines to townscape elements that define the character, and possible dividing effects are decisive. Land take is assessed separately: if the project lies outside the settlements, no elements that define the townscape are lost. A landscape assessment relies on comprehensible criteria and documented viewpoints.
The visibility analysis shows from where the wind turbines can be seen. It takes terrain relief and forest into account; small-scale screening by buildings and hedges is mostly disregarded, so visibility tends to be overestimated. Realistic photomontages make the effects on the surroundings and residents visible: understandable, comprehensible and persuasive. Each consists of a viewpoint with a site plan, existing state and planned state, named with the distance to the nearest turbine. We document all results clearly in the UVE technical contribution, as a reliable basis for authorities, project partners and transparent public relations. Legally, the landscape carries weight but is not the sole deciding factor: for energy transition projects, a refusal may not be based solely on impairments of the landscape under section 17(5) of the EIA Act (UVP-G 2000), subject to the conditions set out there. Depending on the federal province, nature conservation permits are added, in Upper Austria for example for plants in grassland outside closed settlements from a total height of 30 metres. Submission is handled by technical support for the permit procedure for wind farms.
