Blinded and dazzled

There are plans to build a solar farm just around the back of our house. Not eyesore close but close enough. We knew nothing about it. Well, actually that's not quite true. I probably knew but I didn't know that I knew. I remember seeing a piece on the Pinoso Town Hall website a couple of years back (8 September 2021 to be precise) with the snappy title (translated here) of Public information of authorization on undeveloped land for the photovoltaic power plant called "PSF IM2 Jumilla" in the municipality of Pinoso. The website entry mentioned several plots and plot numbers but it didn't give any real clue as to the location, no map, no village name. Obviously there was no purposeful intention to hide the location.

Now the way that things are made public in Spain is that they are published in a sort of official gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Estado or the Official State Bulletin. I suppose it's just published to the Internet nowadays; no paper version. The Boletín, the BOE, is the national version and there are regional versions. We live in the municipality of Pinoso in the province of Alicante. The three provinces that make up the Valencian Community are Alicante, Valencia and Castellón. Anything of municipal, provincial or regional concern is published in a regional version of the boletín called the Diario Oficial de la Generalitat Valenciana. I remember writing an article for the old TIM magazine about how things were officially published in Spain and, in drawing a comparison with the UK. Researching that article at the time I found things out about both systems that I had not known before.

One of our neighbours found out about the plans, I think because he saw some blokes measuring up. It just so happens that, because of his work, he knows how people should be informed about new projects. He's pretty certain that we weren't told what was going to happen as we should have been, that the plans for landscaping the site are inadequate and that, in general, the whole process has been flawed.

Again, to be honest, despite knowing about the BOE and its equivalents I have no idea what the process is for publishing planning permissions. I suppose if a biggish scheme is controversial most of us rely on some sort of interest group kicking up a fuss. If you've passed close to Salinas recently you'll know that's the case there. When that happens we can chain ourselves to trees and face down the bulldozers. I had a quick look at the process is in the UK for planning permissions. Obviously enough there, in the UK, the applicant must be told of the decision as must everyone else who has made a representation to the planning authority or who is an owner of the land or a tenant of an agricultural holding on the land or an adjoining owner or occupier. The UK version adds a caveat which says that the local planning authority should take a flexible approach and make a judgement about whether additional publication of the decision is needed on a case by case basis, weighing up factors such as the level of public interest in the application and the cost of additional notification. 

If Pinoso Town Hall were to follow the same general principles then none of the houses that will have a nice view of the panels owns or rents adjacent land, none of us made any representation to the Town Hall about the project and I don't think that there is much public unrest about the scheme. 

Nonetheless it all just seems a little underhand somehow.

One thing leads to another

Maggie thinks we should be greener. She fancied solar panels to provide at least some of our power. Good idea. After all it's pretty sunny where we live. Just by chance a cold caller got in touch and it was Maggie who took the call. So, this morning, a man came to talk to us about solar panels and other green solutions. He told us it didn't make economic sense. Plan scotched.

If solar power was Maggie's concern mine was a the palm tree. The palm tree that I've been spraying religiously to protect it against the dreaded boring beetle thing.

The palm tree is fit and healthy - so fit and healthy that it's growing into the power lines. Just a bit of bad luck and either the tree gets fried or it blacks out our house and the two next door. For various reasons I don't want to talk to the power company but our neighbours came up with the bright idea of moving the tree rather than the power lines.

I checked with the environmental people at the town hall to make sure the tree wasn't protected and via those strange networks that the exist in rural Spain the return call came not from the town hall but from the palm tree man who did such a good job of shaving and pruning the tree back in November. He suggested that he could supervise the work. He knew a bloke with a crane but could I find a mini excavator? A bit of asking around and I did though that became a little complicated when a pal put a lot of effort into trying to help me find someone and I ended up with an over supply of digger drivers looking for work.

The palm tree man agreed to phone the digger owner and to coordinate the move. We've just got off the phone. He'd talked to the bloke with the crane and he, in turn, knew another bloke with a digger but a full sized one. I asked whether he thought it would be able to get up our tree lined drive. Well if it can't then neither can the crane he said. So now I'm very confused.

These are not easy conversations in my Spanish. The palm tree man is going to come and have a look. It's not impossible I know. There are cranes with long extendable arms, I'm certain of that because one popped a couple of five tonne steel beams over the fence and onto our roof. However, I suspect they don't come cheap and nice straight beams may be easier to handle than floppy palm trees.

Something that seemed so simple is just getting more and more complicated. If I end up phoning the power company we may well have to get back onto the solar power man to maintain a useable supply that doesn't pop the circuit breakers when we turn on the kettle for a nice cup of tea. Or I could just take an axe to the tree!

Sunny days

Apparently Spain is the second largest producer of solar generated electricity in the World after Germany and the third largest producer of wind generated power after the US and Germany. It's hardly surprising that there is more solar power here than in the UK - 180 times as much per head of population but is there really 9 times as much wind in Spain as there is in the UK? And why Germany?

A couple of years ago we went to a local fiesta to celebrate the wine industry in Jumilla. One of the displays had an information board that read something like this - "the only way to succeed in today's cut-throat World market is to introduce new strains of grape to beat off the threat from new producers like Chile, South Africa and California or, even better, yank up all the vineyards and bung in solar panels instead!"

I hear that one of Spains growth exports is renewable energy technologies. There are not a lot of wind turbines around here, though there are stacks of them in nearby Castilla la Mancha but there is a lot of solar stuff in both Alicante and Murcia. Maggie really likes the solar panels, I prefer the turbines myself.