Wind turbines and landscapes: research on the jurisprudential criteria of the landscape insertion of wind turbines.

Summary To understand the question of the landscape insertion of wind turbines supposes the preliminary determination of the legal objects studied. Under the hospices of the notion of "common heritage of the nation", wind turbines and landscapes thus appear as enemy sisters. This conflictuality is consummated when the article L. 110-1 of the Code of the Environment states that the protection of the landscapes is of general interest as much as the development of the natural resources. The postulated antagonism of the two notions must however be qualified in that the administrative judge holds the role of arbitrator in the conflicts born from the fact that the landscape concerns come to limit the implantation of the wind constructions. While this balance of power is about to win the special litigation of classified installations, the litigation of wind power construction permits has been the fertile and favourable ground of the emergence of an objective approach orienting the qualitative and thus a priori subjective appreciation of the damage to landscapes. The litigation of the wind building permits also made it possible to go beyond the control of the damage to the landscapes that the doctrine classically presents as a dissymmetrical control, by the formalization of a control of the landscape balance of the wind constructions being able to symbolize the armistice of this unfruitful confrontation.