Since September 1, 2021, a draft to the Law on Climate Change and Ecological Transition in Navarra has been in process, awaiting approval by the regional parliament.

Despite the ambition of this legal text, it has been described both as insufficient and counterproductive by environmental interest groups such as Alianza por el Clima. They see some of the promises of the bill as problematic. For example, the law proposes that, by 2025, 50% of the electricity consumed by public institutions in the region must be from renewable sources. At first sight, this situation seems desirable from a human point of view. But what about biodiversity?

According to the environmental nonprofit Ecologistas en Acción, more than 8,000 vertebrates have been killed by the blades of wind turbines since the construction of the first wind farm in Navarra, in 1998. This data should draw attention to the fact that the location of farms is an important factor.

One of the main complaints of environmental groups is that wind farms are often located on land where dry cereal crops are grown or in mid-mountain areas. These are areas of less economic value than others, but also home to many birds and other flying animals. Bats, migratory birds and large gliders such as vultures collide with the rigid blades, imperceptible to their senses, and fall dead on the land that was once their home.

Since its  first wind farm in the late 1990s, Navarra has built 50 other wind installations,  becoming an industry pioneer and European leader. But at what price?

Inaccurate studies

The Navarra fund for the protection of the natural environment, Gurelur, accuses the regional government that, behind this attempt to move towards renewable energies lies the industrialization of the few areas of forest that had escaped the wind power plants. However, these studies are not always carried out properly.

According to a study by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the reports that have been used so far in Spain to calculate the environmental impact of these parks have followed erroneous criteria. Since the study began in 2018, the true impact on birds of 20 Spanish wind farms has been analyzed and, comparing the data that were estimated before their construction and the actual number of dead birds, it has been concluded that there is no correlation between the two variables. According to the Spanish national center for scientific research (CSIC), one of the main flaws of the method used so far is that the impact of the wind farm is studied as a whole. This means that twenty turbines that are not located in the same place or at the same distance from each other are subjected to the same estimates. The impact of each wind turbine varies greatly depending on the mountain topography where it is located and the air currents around it, so the CSIC has proposed that the threat that each turbine can generate should be analyzed before it is installed.

Painting turbines black

A different question arises for the wind farms that already occupy Navarra’s territory and are in full operation. Even if companies in charge were obliged to repeat the environmental impact studies of their installations, it would be very difficult for the wind turbines to be moved if the results qualify them as “threatening.”

Four thousand birds of prey, including 94 red kites and 10 Egyptian vultures, are just some of the birds that have died in Navarra due to collisions with wind turbine blades in the last 23 years. It is the seventh leading cause of death for birds, according to Statista.

Perhaps the remedy lies in looking at what other countries have done before. In the last decade, the Norwegian Institute for Nature Conservation has been testing a method to reduce bird deaths from collisions with wind turbines: to paint one of its blades black, making the infrastructure much more noticeable to the birds.

The study showed that bird mortality in farms with painted wind turbines is 72% lower than in those without painted blades. Whether the solution is painting blades or another alternative, some action is necessary for wind and biodiversity to coexist in peace.