About Coastal Wind Farm Developments
It’s generally agreed that the cost of building and commissioning off-shore wind farms is more than onshore wind farms. But the cost of German projects to build a massive wind farm is now going to cost a lot more, due to the danger to thousands of porpoises.
The project will cover an area that is eight times larger than New York City, is scheduled to be in operation by 2030 and is part of Germany’s decision to reduce/reject reliance on nuclear power.
The problem is that the offshore wind farm will be sited in an area that is home to some of the 230,000 porpoises that swim in the North and Baltic seas.
According to experts, an unfortunate side effect of turbines being driven on the seabed is that it could shatter a porpoise’s hearing. Kim Detloff, who works at the German nature conservation group NABU, said
“A porpoise is doomed to die if its hearing is shattered”.
This is because porpoises (and dolphins) use hearing to navigate, find food and not least find a mate.
Consequently, EON and RWE are paying millions of Euros to develop technology to reduce the noise caused by the seabed driving turbines. A possible solution will be to reduce the noise of construction by creating streams of bubbles around the drilling area to cloak/soak up the sound. At the Nordsee Ost project, a large hose perforated to produce a curtain of air bubbles around each of the 48 turbine foundations to absorb the noise from pile driving, has been used.
Putting it into proportion it has been estimated that the installation of this sort of noise-reduction technology will account for only one-two hundredth of the total budget for the wind farm. But that still means that concern for the porpoises’ well-being is one of the factors that make it considerably more expensive to build a wind farm in Germany than, say, the UK.
Oh and just to cap it all, while preparing to lay cables, a number of unexploded mines from the Second World War, have been found. These will have to be rendered harmless, adding to the costs of the project. Presumably, detonation will be out of the question due to the aurally sensitive porpoises. About 1.6m metric tonnes of weapons, including naval mines, TNT bombs and artillery shells filled with chemical agents, are estimated to be lying in the German North and Baltic Sea, according to a government-sponsored report released in December 2011.
Not everyone thinks the construction of the wind farm needs to be” fit-for porpoise”. On various blogs and social media sites, Germans and project supporters say that there is only so far one can go into protecting the possible adverse effects of wind farm construction on wildlife. One school of thought considers that the porpoises will simply move away during construction and return after completion, given that these are highly intelligent creatures.
