My wife and I visited a friend last weekend who has a country retreat in the province of Almeria in Spain, just on the edge of Europe's only desert, the Desierto de Tabernas, a unique ecosystem that a decade ago was said to be threatened by further siltation. You undoubtedly know the landscape as the setting for various Hollywood productions, because when wages were too high or unions too difficult in America, the film studios shot their westerns in this desert, flew in their star actors and hired Spanish cowboys : The sets have remained standing and now serve as the Mini Holywood tourist attraction. The landscape is so special that it was also used as an alien desert in Star Wars. To our amazement, it now indeed looks more like a science fiction film than the landscape that Peter O'Toole once galloped through in Lawrence of Arabia or where Harrisson Ford grabbed his whip in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
No more Tumble weeds
At the edge of the desert we see that hundreds of hectares of olive groves have been cut down and that the wild desert vegetation has been cleared with bulldozers to make way for vast fields of solar panels as far as the eye can see. The result is a futuristic view and an ecological wasteland; the green paradox made visible. Because although an arid desert plant may not look very fresh; its roots do stop further desertification and the plant sows itself over kilometers like the iconic 'tumble weed' from the westerns. They know this all too well in Africa where they are now working on the Great Green Wall project, plantings to prevent the further advance of the Sahara and the Sahel. While the solar panels do provide renewable energy, they simultaneously destroy the vulnerable ecosystem and promote further desertification. Associations of nature conservationists are protesting fiercely against these mega solar panel parks that are being built by the major energy companies with the approval of the Spanish Minister of Energy Transition. . Further along the Mediterranean, in the nature park of Cabo de Gata, there is also a lot of protest against the windmills that have been erected on the migration route of rare migratory birds, which are now being mowed down en masse by the rotating blades of the windmills, which increases the tension between the good intention of renewable energy and actual nature conservation even more visible.
The role of the Spanish government in this has also been very dubious for a long time. When I bought a farm in Andalusia seventeen years ago, I was surprised at how few photovoltaic solar panels I saw on the roofs, although I did see installations for this here and there. hot water. Andalusia has the most hours of sunshine in all of Europe, but there were more photovoltaic panels on roofs in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany than here. The reason was absurd: private installation of photovoltaic solar panels was punishable! Violators were fined up to 40,000 euros. As a Flemish person steeled by absurd laws, I soon discovered a loophole in the legislation that still allowed me to install panels. I had a company here and companies were allowed to install solar panels. Quite obvious, otherwise the major electricity producers would have difficulty building their parks. And in Spain too, the boards of directors of those energy giants are filled with political heavyweights from all parties; usually ex-ministers with a well-filled address book, so that legislation can be steered in the desired direction. Nothing new under the sun... It turns out that not only the Tabernas desert is the victim of the solar panel park craze, but also along the centuries-old Silver Route (ruta de la Plata) between Seville and Cáceres, gigantic parks now mar the previously breathtaking landscape. An opinion piece in the newspaper El Diario compares the 'boom' of wind farms and solar panel parks with the building craze in Spain in the 1990s. Large landowners sell their land dearly to electricity farmers and politicians with half-closed eyes issue permits without considering the impact on fauna. and flora are taken into account. Those who protest, such as the association 'Ecologistas en acción', are quickly accused of being against progress or - oh irony - against sustainable energy. It is a battle of lonely Don Quixotes against monstrous windmills and solar panels that resemble giant Kafkaesque insects. It will not be the last paradox that the Greens will encounter, not in Spain and not in the rest of the world. A metamorphosis in the style of Kafka's Gregor Samsa(the main character in Kafkas novel Metamorphosis who wakes up as an insect) will be needed to rectify this. When we drive back home after our weekend in the desert, we see another paradox: the branches of the cleared olive and almond trees are set on fire in the fields so that thick black smoke billows over the quiet Ruta Nacional340: it is precisely to prevent the burning of fossil fuels that the trees had to make way for solar panel parks. The thicker blocks are neatly loaded onto trailers: they can be sold as fuel wood for the fireplace next winter, because it also gets cold in the desert when the sun has set and the panels no longer supply electricity for the electric heater. I know that from my own experience with the solar panels on my farm, the electricity of which I stored in batteries so that I could live completely independently of the grid. When there was a power outage in the community due to heavy winds, my farm was the only one in the valley where there was still light. But in winter the days are shorter and the batteries could not be fully charged; the dunkelflaute(dunkel= dark, flaute = flute to lull as the Germans call it). So that when I sometimes ran out of power in the middle of the night and had to sleep with the flashlight next to the bed in case I had to look for a horse that had broken free. Fortunately, I had no neighbors who could be bothered by the naked man who, wearing nothing more than a pair of rubber boots and a flashlight in his hand, went looking for a horse that had broken out and I wasn't sure whether it was neighing with fear or laughter, because of my dunkelflaute, which had shrunk due to the cold.
Wow. For "Green" energy, they cut down trees and put up solar panels, and created an eyesore. Conveniently, they forgot trees scrub CO2 from the air.
To hell with the way it looks: the solar panels have destroyed the entire ecosystem.
The globe is being terraformed so that nothing natural can live here.