7 May 2026
Wind turbines provide climate-friendly electricity, but they also change the appearance of landscapes. A study involving researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich now shows how wind energy and attractive landscapes in Europe can be reconciled.
Wind turbines generate a lot of electricity in winter – precisely when demand is high. Nevertheless, expansion is stalling in many regions of Europe. One key reason is that wind turbines visibly alter landscapes. In regions where valleys, coastlines, or mountain panoramas are considered especially beautiful, resistance to new installations is often particularly strong.
Against this backdrop, researchers from ETH Zurich, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), and Forschungszentrum Jülich have now analyzed for the first time on a Europe-wide scale what happens when landscapes particularly worthy of protection are excluded from wind energy use. The decisive factor here is aesthetic quality – that is, how “beautiful” landscapes are perceived.
The study focused on two key questions: How much wind energy potential would be lost, and how much would the costs of onshore wind power increase? “Until now, these questions have mainly been studied for individual countries such as Germany or the United Kingdom. With this study, we now have the first harmonized, high-resolution analysis for Europe,” says Dr.-Ing. Jann Weinand from the Institute of Climate and Energy Systems – Jülich System Analysis (ICE-2).
The result: If particularly beautiful landscapes are excluded across Europe, the potential for wind energy drops significantly – by up to 43 percent in the strictest protection scenario. However, the average levelized cost of electricity for onshore wind power remains comparatively stable at the European level.
“Many economically attractive wind sites are located outside the highest-rated landscape areas,” says Weinand. “That is why, across Europe, the exclusion has only a moderate effect on the cost per kilowatt-hour generated – also because many of these areas particularly worthy of protection are remote, and expansion there would be costly anyway.”
The situation is different at the regional level. In countries like Norway or in the Alpine region, windy sites often coincide with particularly attractive landscapes. Under the strictest protection scenario, the potential for wind power there could decline by more than 60 percent, and in Norway by over 90 percent. At the same time, the costs of onshore wind power would rise significantly – by around 15 percent in Switzerland and by more than 40 percent in Norway.
The authors therefore emphasize in their study: For planning purposes, a glance at European averages is not sufficient. What is crucial is a spatially differentiated assessment.
“In countries with favorable economic conditions, such as Germany, expansion is often possible at relatively low cost even in particularly attractive landscapes – though this frequently meets with local resistance,” says Weinand. “In regions characterized by scenic beauty, targeted measures can help defuse conflicts.”
This includes, for example, so-called micro-siting: Here, the exact placement of individual wind turbines is optimized so that the impact on the landscape is kept to a minimum.
A central question of the study was: How can scenic beauty be assessed at all? To answer this, the researchers used a large crowdsourced dataset from the UK. More than 200,000 landscape photos had been rated by users on a scale of 1 to 10.
Based on this dataset, researchers at ETH Zurich trained an AI model that learned which landscape features are associated with high scenic attractiveness. Natural landscapes, glacier and rocky regions, and proximity to water received particularly high ratings, while settlements and agricultural areas scored significantly lower on average.
In the next step, the team applied the model to 29 European countries. The Jülich researchers contributed their expertise in the spatial assessment of wind energy potential and costs to systematically examine the impacts on electricity generation and economic viability.
Chen R, Pelser T, Lohrmann A, Weinand JM, McKenna R
Data-driven landscape scenicness mapping for continental-scale onshore wind resource assessment.
Energy and AI, 28. April 2026, DOI: 10.1016/j.egyai.2026.100752
This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe (in Switzerland via SERI) research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101083460 (WIMBY).
Press release from ETH Zurich dated May 4, 2026
