Environment-Mexico: Farmers and Scientists See Risks in Wind Energy

ENVIRONMENT-MEXICO: Farmers and Scientists See Risks in Wind Energy

Source Link: www.ipsnews.net

With the blessing of development agencies, transnational corporations and environmentalists, the Mexican government is breaking ground for a big wind energy project. But peasant farmers and bird experts aren't too happy about it.

Achieving that goal involves setting up more than 3,000 turbines in Mexico's windiest zone, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the southern state of Oaxaca, as well as several other wind farms around the country with dozens of turbines each.

But erecting the windmills, tall towers with a 27-metre blade span, requires negotiating with landowners, most of whom are farmers. Some have complained that they were taken advantage of when the first wind farm was created in 1994.

Meanwhile, bird experts warn that many species are at risk of being killed by the giant blades, which could cause an environmental chain reaction across the continent, because various are migratory species.

"Everything is bent towards facilitating the wind farms, but there is not much interest in the birds, which in the long term could bring much broader problems," Raúl Ortiz-Pulido, spokesman for the Mexican office of the BirdLife International, told Tierramérica.

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mod edit: removed all caps from title



[edit on 3/2/2007 by Gools]

This is true here in the U.S. as well. I used to live in the People's Republic of California, and work for an electric utility there. There is also a very large windmill farm at Altamonte Pass east of SF. Anyway, people complained more about the danger to birds than they did the noise and the "footprint" of all the windmills.

And at the utility, I heard them talking once about the "DBIRD" database, so I asked what it was. Turned out to be a database that kept track of all the dead birds (get it, DBIRD?) found under the electric transmission wires. Yes, someone had to go out and count them for input into the database.