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ARCHIVED - Concern in Malaga reflects regional worries about proliferation of solar farm projects
The president of Malaga Provincial Council has written to the Spanish and Andalusian governments to call for delays to dozens of projects currently being processed in the area.
Residents of many parts of Andalusia are becoming concerned due to the volume of large-scale projects for solar farms in rural areas all over the region which are currently being submitte for planning approval or are already under construction.
In Málaga province alone there are currently 75 projects of this type being processed, according to Francisco Salado, the president of Málaga Provincial Council.
Sr Salado has written to the Andalusian regional government and the Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition to call for the processing of projects to be put on hold to allow for agreements to be reached regarding the location and details of huge future solar farms.
The projects, he has stressed, need to respect environmental, tourist, cultural, agricultural and nature assets and each local council’s opinion ought to be taken into account as the farms will drastically transform the places in which they are built.
There has, the provincial leader complained, been a distinct lack of communication and planning with councils, which he claims have been walked all over, and with local residents, who are increasingly coming out in protest as they become aware of the fact that their surroundings are coming under threat.
Moreover, Sr Salado said, megaprojects are being split up into smaller areas before they are presented to the authorities for approval to keep their generation capacity under 50 MW and avoid the need to obtain authorization from the central government.
There are concerns that Spain’s energy transformation is being rushed through due to pressure from the EU, causing those involved to forget their responsibility to protect the countryside and the agricultural sector, which is unable to compete with the huge amounts of money that solar farms are willing to pay to rent or purchase land.
Moreover, Sr Salado has concluded, once subsidies have been paid and investments recouped, there is a risk of the solar farms being abandoned with the subsequent impact on the environment and landscape and high dismantling and recycling costs.
Nor, he said, are many of the millions of euros mentioned in projects likely to end up benefitting the places where the farms are built in the medium to long term, as they will create very few jobs and, worse still, he says, they will consume large amounts of scarce resources such as water.
A similar situation has occurred in the region of Murcia, the sunniest mainland region of Spain, where high impact solar installations have mushroomed due to the demand for more renewable energy sources.
In the Murcia region the regional government has created new legislation governing the construction of new solar plants and defining not only the type of locations in which they can be built, but also laying out measures which must be followed by those building them in order to ensure that they are able to blend more sympathetically into the landscape.
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Image: A Chinese State-owned solar plant in Mazarrón Murcia, one of four owned by the Chinese government in Murcia.
staff.inc.and