I think this headline is misleading.

A better headline might read: “Coal found beneath wind farm. Turbines dismantled to make room for mining operation.”

The linked article is two sentences long and offers no context or understanding of the situation. It might as well be a headline. The only useful part of it is the photo of the wind farm being dismantled, which also shows a completely different wind farm in the background, on the other side of the expanding mine, that is not being dismantled:

But you wouldn't realize that just from reading the article.

My understanding based on this much better article from Recharge News is that the following information is critical to understanding this decision:

First, the wind farm being dismantled is the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm, which consists of 8 turbines built over 20 years ago in 2001, totaling just over 10 MW of capacity (1.3 MW each). Recently constructed wind turbine power outputs are estimated at a 42% capacity factor, which is to say they generate about 42% of the peak power they're rated for because wind isn't always blowing; this would likely be lower for the older wind farm, but we'll use the current amount. The 10 MW wind farm would have made 3 GWh per month, which based on an average of 893 kWh per month per household is enough to power... 3386 homes [edit: corrected my horrible math]. Not nothing, but not a lot by modern standards considering the Chinese just built a single wind turbine that outdoes the entire Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm by half and then some.

Furthermore, as the turbines were built 20 years ago, they were always going to be decommissioned around this time, and that's documented in the agreements back then under which the turbines were built. RWE continues to construct many turbines elsewhere, claiming 7.2 GW of turbines are currently under construction, 720 times the rated output of the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm. They've also built 200 MW of wind capacity in that locality, likely what we see in the background of that image.

If RWE were to replace the turbines that are being decommissioned, the coal underneath them will be worthless by the time the new turbines are decommissioned, and it's supposedly the last of the coal they will be allowed to dig up. They've clearly made huge investments in building out wind power, so this represents the last vestiges of cleaning up their act.

I could not advocate more strongly that coal should be left in the ground, but this all comes down to corporate investors who care more about money than the environment, and agreements made 20 years ago, as well as the fact Germany and much of the EU is still desperate for any source of energy to maintain their current level of industry right now while they're still building out carbon-free generation to fully replace coal/oil/gas. Reality is complex, and to me this isn't as big of an insult to clean energy advocacy as the microscopic EUObserver "article" could lead one to think it is.

Coal is still dying in the West, so let's not go thinking this one last gasp means that trend has changed. If we're lucky, and demand for coal falls quickly enough, they might even scrap this mine before they've gotten everything out of it. Keep pushing!

China bad

Germany is basically what happens when an entire country embraces greenwashing as its ideology.

Germany's green energy push was secretly propped up by outsourcing fossil fuel needs to Russian natural gas. The war in Ukraine and America subsequently blowing up the Nordstream 2 pipeline means Germany will need to find new alternatives to feeding their energy needs. One could hope this results in a speed up of green tech development as it becomes more of a pressing necessity than just, you know, the right thing to do. And hey speaking of knowing the right thing to do and then not doing it because of the perverse economic incentives for ignoring it, it's funny to note that the global leader in green tech is China but due to this new cold war the US is brewing and due to Germany's newly-humbled-into role as Jr Junior partner to the US there's no way there will be the necessary cooperation there between national tech sectors

Maybe they should support more nazis, sanctions against other fuel resources and further terrorist attacks against peaceful infrastructure by their so called "allies".