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Protecting porpoises' hearing adds millions to wind farm projects
Porpoises are adding millions of euros to costs for wind-turbine developers in waters off Germany, delaying the nation's shift from nuclear energy. About 231,000 porpoises, which are smaller and stouter than dolphins, live in the North Sea and Baltic Sea.
August 16, 2012
in The Telegraph
EON and RWE, the country's two biggest utilities, are using technologies that reduce noise from driving turbines into the seabed after nature groups complained that the work damages the sonar-like hearing of porpoises. Unexploded mines from the Second World War also are holding up work.
"A porpoise is doomed to die if its hearing is shattered," Kim Detloff, a marine expert at German nature conservation group NABU, told Bloomberg. "The regulator must sanction developers if they repeatedly violate the noise limit."
The concerns show that wind developers are beginning to face the same scrutiny as oil companies for projects in sensitive places,... [continue via Web link]
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