VR Visualisation Infrastructure Debates Europe: a wind farm debated for twenty years in Switzerland. A power line that took six years longer to build than planned in Germany. A wind farm in Norway that kept running for over 600 days after courts declared it illegal. Three very different European infrastructure stories, one shared pattern: the technical challenge is rarely the real obstacle. The real obstacle is that almost nobody can picture how these places will actually look once the project exists.
At Avocado360, we have produced VR films for exactly this kind of project, most recently two for the Swiss energy company Axpo. Looking across Europe, the same pattern shows up again and again, in different countries, with different technologies.
Switzerland: When Twenty Years Is Not Enough
Above La Chaux-de-Fonds, a Swiss watchmaking town recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site, a proposed wind farm at Crêt-Meuron has been debated since 2001. Seven turbines are planned. The town itself formally objected for years, worried the turbines could jeopardise its heritage status, only withdrawing its objection in 2021 after Switzerland’s Federal Office of Culture confirmed in writing that the project was compatible with the UNESCO listing (Suisse Eole, January 2021).
For our VR film at Crêt-Meuron, we filmed the real Jura landscape and added the seven proposed turbines to scale, produced bilingually in French and German, because the debate involves both language regions.
The VR film for the proposed Crêt-Meuron wind farm. More in our portfolio case study.
Germany: When Power Lines Used to Be a Symbol of Progress
SuedLink, one of Germany’s central north-to-south power corridors, will eventually run around 700 kilometres through six federal states, carrying wind power from the north to industrial regions in the south. Originally planned for completion in 2022, the project is now expected to go into operation by the end of 2028, at a cost of roughly 10 billion euros (ZDF).
A genuinely surprising detail: in the 1950s, German postage stamps celebrated power lines as a symbol of progress. Today, the same type of infrastructure is one of the country’s most contested planning issues, with organised citizen groups opposing routes across the country (Energiewinde). As a compromise, most of the line is now being buried underground, including sections running through a former salt mine and beneath the river Elbe near Hamburg (ZDF).
Norway: When a Court Ruling Could Not Stop the Turbines
The most striking European example comes from Norway. The Fosen wind farm, part of Europe’s largest onshore wind development, was built on land that the Indigenous Sámi people have used for centuries to herd reindeer. In October 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the licences for the wind farm were invalid, finding that the turbines violated the Sámi right to enjoy their own culture under international human rights law (ICT News).
What happened next is the part most people find hard to believe: the turbines kept running. More than 600 days after the ruling, the wind farm was still fully operational, because no legal mechanism existed to shut it down immediately (US SIF case study). It took until 2023 and 2024 for the Norwegian government and the affected Sámi communities to reach a settlement, which kept the wind farm operating while allocating new grazing land and compensation (JURIST). Notably, Swiss firms BKW and Energy Infrastructure Partners were among the wind farm’s investors.
Illustration of the Fosen peninsula, showing the Storheia and Roan wind farm sites.
The Netherlands: When the Problem Is Too Little Infrastructure, Not Too Much
The Dutch case reverses the pattern entirely. Rather than fighting new infrastructure, the Netherlands is short of it. As of 2026, over 14,000 businesses sit on waiting lists for a grid connection, with some regions facing delays of up to ten years, a phenomenon known locally as “netcongestie” (Dutch Brief). Grid congestion is estimated to cost the Dutch economy around 40 billion euros a year (Energy Global).
Solving this means building large amounts of highly visible new infrastructure, substations and high voltage lines, quickly, across the country. The Dutch environmental agency PBL has warned that local land use disputes could delay up to a quarter of planned renewable capacity if communities are not brought along early. The Netherlands faces the same imagination gap as Germany and Norway, only with far less time to close it.
The Common Pattern
Across all four countries, wind in Switzerland, power lines in Germany, Indigenous rights in Norway, and grid capacity in the Netherlands, the same underlying issue repeats. People rarely object to facts. They object to what they cannot picture, or to what they picture incorrectly. A power line described as “700 kilometres, mostly underground” conveys almost nothing. A real image of the corridor through a specific valley conveys a great deal.
The Fosen case adds a further lesson: even a unanimous Supreme Court ruling could not immediately undo a wind farm that was already built and operating. That is a strong argument for getting communication right before construction begins, not after.
Where Visualisation Helps, and Where It Does Not
It is worth being honest about the limits. A VR film does not replace political debate, and it cannot resolve genuine conflicts between energy supply, landscape protection, Indigenous rights or local interests. What it can do is more modest, but effective: it removes one entire source of disagreement, uncertainty about what a place would actually look like.
Both of our Axpo projects illustrate this. The Flumserberg wind farm was ultimately not built; wind conditions turned out to be insufficient for economic operation. That did not diminish the value of the film; its purpose, providing an honest basis for discussion, had already been fulfilled. At Crêt-Meuron, the debate continues, but for the first time with a real picture instead of only drawings and figures.
The VR film for the Flumserberg wind farm. More in our portfolio case study.
Which Project in Your Region Would Benefit From a Real Picture?
Long-running infrastructure debates exist in nearly every European country, whether wind, power lines, water storage or something else entirely. If you are involved in a project where people simply cannot picture the outcome, we are happy to discuss, without obligation, what a visualisation could look like.
