I-DE, Iberdrola España's distribution company, and the Government of La Rioja will invest €80,000 in adapting 45 electricity pylons in bird protection areas
- The interventions fall under the 27-year-old framework agreement between both entities to reduce bird accidents with power lines
The Director General of the Environment and Landscape, Ignacio Sáenz de Urturi, and the representative of i-DE, the Iberdrola España distributor, Carlos Sobrino, signed an agreement today, September 16, setting out the actions to be carried out in 2025 under projects to modify power lines to protect birdlife. The actions have a total budget of €80,000, which will be financed half by the Government of La Rioja and half by i-DE Redes Eléctricas Inteligentes.
These measures are part of the latest three-year action agreement signed by both entities in 2024 to adapt electrical supports to improve the protection of birdlife through actions aimed at preventing power line–bird incidents in so-called 'protection zones'.
Once the regional government had carried out the necessary studies to determine the priority areas for action, the overhead lines for work in 2025 were selected. In this year, work will be carried out on the Sorzano-Sojuela line, where 12 supports will be adapted; on the Cihuri branch line, where work will extend to 15 supports; on the Agua de Ausejo water collection branch line, where 10 electrical supports will be adapted; and on the branch line to Bodegas Toloza, with 8 electrical supports worked on. In total, 45 electrical supports will be adapted in 2025. Work is expected to be completed before 30 November.
I-DE Redes Eléctricas has designed a catalogue of improvement measures for the supports depending on their configuration, such as covering the different phases and connections, increasing the safety distance by changing insulators to lengthen the chain or providing stick-type insulators, replacing crossarms with special ones designed to protect birds, installing anti-nesting devices and other measures.
More than 250 supports in three years in La Rioja’s bird protection areas
The three-year agreement signed by both entities last year provides for the adaptation of more than 250 electricity pylons in bird protection areas in La Rioja over three years, adapting high-voltage power lines in accordance with Royal Decree 1432/2008 and with the priorities set by the regional executive based on its knowledge and experience of the areas and habitats of birdlife in the region, as well as the impact power lines have on them.
With this information, Iberdrola España's distribution company will apply the most appropriate bird protection measures in each case. Ignacio Sáenz de Urturi also said that ‘the company is committed to adapting, whenever action is required, the five high-voltage line supports it owns that are closest to the point where any incident involving birds classified as vulnerable or endangered is detected’.
This new agreement continues the work that the Government of La Rioja and Grupo Iberdrola have been carrying out for 27 years to advance the establishment of preventive and corrective measures to reduce bird accidents with power lines to protect endangered bird species. ‘Through this agreement, over the course of its 27 years, more than €2.3M has been invested in correcting power lines, work has been done on 151 power lines, 1,668 supports have been corrected and 628 spans have been marked to prevent bird accidents, meaning that between the two actions, more than 388 kilometres of power lines have been worked on,’ he said.
Carlos Sobrino, the i-DE Redes Eléctricas Inteligentes representative, said that ‘in 2024, i-DE carried out a total of 41 actions in La Rioja, both in special bird protection areas and in other enclaves, modifying a total of 352 supports, with an investment of more than €580,000’.
La Rioja was one of the first regions in the country to adopt regulations governing power lines to protect birdlife in 1998, behind only Andalusia, Navarre and Extremadura. To develop the objectives of these regulations, the regional government and Iberdrola España signed their first collaboration agreement that same year, and since then both have worked on surveying and inventorying dangerous power lines and correcting them, financing actions in these territories 50-50.
The actions financed by this agreement focus on adapting the supports installed before the indicated date, so that in the short term none of the installations in La Rioja's electricity distribution grid will pose any risk to birdlife.
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