- The Regional Government of Aragón and Endesa have signed a collaboration agreement to develop actions for power lines to reduce or eliminate the risks of collision and electrocution for threatened birds. The agreement was signed today by the Agriculture, Livestock and Environment Minister, Joaquín Olona and by Endesa's General Manager for Aragón, Ignacio Montaner.
Since 2002, five collaboration agreements have been signed between E-Distribución Redes Digitales and the Regional Government of Aragón, each lasting approximately 4 years, for the development of power line projects to reduce or eliminate the risks of collision and electrocution for threatened birds. The last of them was signed in 2018 and has now terminated, so both parties now wish to continue with this collaboration. Over the period of the agreements, more than a hundred installations owned by the electricity company in the three provinces of Aragón have been jointly corrected.
Within the framework of these agreements, both institutions' technicians seek the best solutions to mitigate the problems that the electricity network can cause for birds, whether by defining new low-conflict routes, proposing the use of new materials or looking for construction solutions that are safer for birds. They also select the lines to be corrected each year, prioritising those identified as being most dangerous to birds and providing reports on the most appropriate corrective work to be undertaken on each of the installations.
E-Distribución Redes Digitales, whose corporate objective includes creating and operating electricity distribution infrastructures, is aware of the need to take actions to remove obstacles in infrastructures or make them permeable and so reduce the mortality of animal species and increase connectivity for natural populations of species. This involves reducing or removing risks to birds of collision and electrocution, especially for species classified as threatened and in places where there is evidence that such events have occurred.
The electricity grid in Aragón consists of thousands of kilometres of overhead facilities, many of them built before the current regulations aimed at minimising the impact of these infrastructures on birdlife, dating from 2005 in Aragon and from 2008 in the case of the national regulations.
This circumstance means that corrective action on power lines is ongoing, both in terms of the volume and the cost of the work involved. Medium to long-term collaborations, such as those included in this agreement, are best when it comes to finding rational solutions to the problems that collision and electrocution create for the conservation of some of the most threatened bird species in the Iberian Peninsula, such as Bonelli's eagle, golden kites and bearded vultures.