Alex Trelinski
PUBLIC consultation has started on a new law which will oblige electricity companies to do more to stop birds being electrocuted on high-voltage power lines or dying in wind turbines.
The Royal Decree is being prepared by the Ministry for Ecological Transition, after the environmental group SEO/Birdlife denounced around 20 storks dying on Tuesday next to a transformer unit in Marchena, Sevilla province.
The new regulation will put the onus of power firms to make changes, as opposed to public money being used to upgrade power cables.
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Spain has had a law since 2008 for the improvement of high-voltage lines to prevent the death of birds, which took into account the future modernisation of infrastructures.
But it included a provision that that the Government would fund any improvements.
Conservation groups complained the provision resulted in too much time being taken to release public funds and have delayed or even blocked power lines being upgraded.
Juan Carlos Atienza from SEO/BirdLife pointed out that several court rulings in recent years backed up his view that companies must pay for modernisation themselves to avoid bird deaths.
At the end of 2022, the Government approved the state strategic plan for natural heritage and biodeversity up to 2030.
It referred to the changing the 2008 royal decree to ‘eliminate the obligation of public financing for the correction of old lines’ and established a goal that ‘by 2030 all dangerous lines’ would be ‘suitably modified’.
Due to delays- mainly due to last year’s election. Atienza believes the law should now be approved this autumn.
The most frequent cause of unnatural mortality in birds is related to electrical conduction structures.
According to SEO/BirdLife figures from 2023, 47% of the unnatural bird mortality recorded in Spain’s Wildlife Recovery Centres corresponded to collisions with power lines and electrocution.
In the text for the Ecological Transition Ministry consultation, it is pointed out that: “Another cause of wildlife mortality that has been revealed to be significant and additional to that which occurs in power lines is the collision of species with wind turbines.”
“To avoid and correct situations of high mortality in these facilities, it is necessary to collect a series of risk reduction measures that have proven their validity, and to establish an appropriate framework for monitoring these facilities, establishing, in turn, mortality thresholds that allow the identification of particularly dangerous wind turbines”.
The Ministry says it will be first time such obligations will be introduced to wind generators.
Juan Carlos Atienza says there are already devices for sale that detect birds and stop blades so that collisions don’t happen, and that the gear is not very expensive compared to the overall cost of a wind turbine.
Atienza believes the most important thing about the new law is ‘adequate monitoring of mortality’ which does not happened now.
“It is estimated that 20% of wind turbines are responsible for 80% of deaths,” he pointed out.
“If the death of birds linked to renewables is ended, the movements opposing wind farms would no longer make so much sense,” Atienza conclued.
