The Outes City Council invited the GWO to an informative event on wind energy

• by OEGA
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On Saturday, 10 October, the GWO participated in the informative talk on “The impacts of wind energy in rural areas” organized by the Serra de Outes town council with the participation of the APEON and Quijote Outes social platforms and the presence of José Antonio Pereira Gil, mayor of A Baña; Juan José Blanco Riveiro, mayor of Mazaricos; Manuel Ángel Leis Míguez, mayor of Negreira; Manuel González López, mayor of Outes; and David Barbeira García, mayor of Santa Comba.
In the first part of the talk, the representatives of the two neighborhood platforms defended their opposition to the development of the Maragouto and Banzas wind farms. They argued that future wind farms would be located on land subject to parcel consolidation; this would put at risk the viability of livestock activities, the main source of income for those lands. Likewise, they claimed that several wind turbines would be too close to houses and populated rural areas. They demanded a reform of the Galician Wind Sector Plan to increase the required distance between wind farms and residential areas. They also pointed out the high environmental values of various spaces, such as the Fervenza and Carballeira de Santa Leocadia and the Cotro viewpoint. They confirmed the presence of alternative locations for these wind turbines that would not put the social, economic and environmental life of these parishes at risk. For all these reasons, the two platforms expressed their total rejection of the wind farms planned in this area of the province of A Coruña. The city councils present in the talk gave them their full support on this.

Xavier Simon, head of the GWO, basically defended in his intervention that the change in trend in the dynamics of rural spaces could be achieved by modifying the role of rural communities in the model for promoting renewable energies. Above all, this would happen if these communities had access to higher incomes. The GWO showed that this would not jeopardize the transformation of the fossil energy model, a goal we are all committed to. The main characteristics of the so-called “standard contract”, recently presented to all the Galician society, were also shared. In relation to the economic offer made to the residents of Serra de Outes by the promoter company, the GWO asserted that the amount of the offer was nowhere near 50% of the average amounts currently being paid.
After the presentation, several questions and some reflections of great interest were made by the attendees. Among them, we would like to highlight that of the “Galician Network for Rural Living” representative, who indicated “… the rural has the resources to be a power without wind farms. Yet we must have wind energy because it is a renewable source. So are we, the neighbors, going to participate in this process or not?
The event closed with the reading of the Manifesto “Declaration in favor of a sustainable and fair development of wind energy in rural territories” by the 5 aforementioned mayors. If you would like to access this document, which is only available in Galician language, please click on the following link.