Nature             13TH Jan 2003         BBC 4                (TRANSCRIPTION)

“This weeks ‘Nature’ which takes us a little bit back in time. [former recording played here]

We’re just flying now across from Tenby to Saudersfoot. To our right out at sea there are large flocks of scoters, large flocks in the distance, we’re now passing the ground team at about 600ft……hope they can see what we can see.

I remember that surprisingly well in the days nearly10 years ago now when I’d just started reporting for the Natural History programme -  Nature’s predecessor.

What our airborne ornitholgist Jeff is hoping his ground team can see are the numbers of these scoters, small black ducks which spend most of their life at sea. The trouble is that fellow ornithologist Barry Stewart and our reporter Mark Cawardine on the ground today are very unlikely to get such a good view as Jeff because scoters simply aren’t easy to see from the land.

There are a lot of birds out there, a lot more than the last time we were out..

I did manage to see common scoter from the Carmarthen Bay shore although they were miles away and to be honest all I could make out even through a telescope was a gathering of little black blobs and that’s the thing about these all black sea ducks, well the males are all black but the females are dark brown The thing is they are really shy and so not many people get to see them which is one reason why we know surprisingly little about their numbers, lives and habits.

They ‘re very rare breeders in this country but in the winter they gather in enormous flocks offshore. Now many of their favourite wintering grounds happen to be ideal sites for locating offshore wind farms and in this programme we will be looking at the irony of providing renewable energy while possibly posing a threat to local wildlife.

The Government is committed to generating 10% of our electricity requirements from renewable resources by the year 2010 and since we are reputed to be the windiest country in Europe wind energy is clearly going to play a vital role in meeting this commitment.

But first lets have a look at the scoters themselves.

Tony Fox is a senior research biologist at the National Environment Research Institution in Denmark and has been studying the common skota for many years

The poor old common skota, it’s a very common species in numbers probably. We estimate about 1.6 million individuals in the western palaearctic and you might think well that’s an awful lot of birds, we don’t really have to worry about them, if we loose a few here and there it doesn’t really matter but I think the problem at the moment is the common skota is being hammered from all sides and it’s not a species we know very much about.

They tend to live often 5 or 6 km offshore so nobody sees them. I mean it often makes me laugh to think that a small group of observers here in Denmark, who actually sit in the plane to count these birds are probably the only ones that know that there are over a million birds off Danish waters.. 

Most sea going vessels don’t venture into the areas where these birds occur and so it is really only the dedicated observers who ever see these concentrations, and they are very spectacular.

We don’t have quite as many skota here in Britain as they do in Denmark but we do have an undeniably large wintering population and several key sites some of international importance .Carnaervon Bay,  Cardigan Bay , Liverpool Bay and Shell Flatts off  Blackpool immediately come to mind.

We are only now beginning to realise just how important coastal Britain is for these birds

with the help of extensive surveying and monitoring work conducted in recent years. These were in part given a new sense of urgency by the Sea Empress oil spill in 1996   which killed nearly 5000 common skota off the Welsh coast.

  There is at least a biodiversity action plan in place since 1998 which spells out the importance of safeguarding the skota’s major wintering and moulting sites

So I went to meet the chair of the biodiversity action plan steering group, Baz Hughes.at the wildfowl and wetlands trust. in  Slimbridge  where he’s also the  head of threatened species

I asked him about the population size of common skota in Britain

We have a number of sites which are of national importance, particularly Canaervon

Bay in South Wales that’s currently being designated as a special protection area under the Bird’s Directive. That site holds maybe 20 to 25000 birds every winter or at least the peak counts are 20 t0 25000 birds, we have very little idea what the real turnover is so we could actually be looking numbers some magnitude even greater than that.

 So what portion of the British wintering population does that account for, is that half of the whole population.. Yes and again 5 years ago we thought we had only about 30000  wintering birds now we might suggest 50 or 60 . In a couple of years time with a few more aerial surveys we might be looking at 100000

Now why is it that so many birds do actually winter in Britain do we provide good food…

 Absolutely we find good feeding areas which are typically less than 10 metre depth, with

sunny bottoms, high concentrations of bi valve molluscs we also have relatively little shell fishing activity in these areas

There were sites in the Netherlands where this used to be high concentrations of these bi valves but they’re completely fished out. And then we have situations where flocks of 100000 skota would just disappear overnight as these shellfish are over extracted, where       in the UK we have very little of that shellfishing activity within these main sites and therefore we have perfect feeding conditions for skota,

Now you say within sort of 10metres , that would imply they’d be closer to the shore than they seem to be. so I know what I’m talking about… and until recently a lot of the counts have been from the shore and a lot of the birds have been out of sight, so how come they’re so far away from land. They tend to as with any diving duck they will tend to try to feed in areas which minimise their energy expenditure so if they can feed in shallow depths they will prefer to do so. But there are certain areas around the coast say off North Norfolk, Carmarthen Bay is another example, Shell Flatts off Blackpool, where these 10 metre depth contours are probably up to 20 or even 30 kilometres off shore. We’ve found that ground based counts underestimate birds further offshore

So that’s why somewhere like Shell Flatts off Blackpool of all places went unnoticed for so long.

Absolutely and again we didn’t know anything about how many birds were off there  until the aerial surveys that have just been conducted over the last two winters

 So really it’s 2 winters they’ve been done, does that change our whole picture of common skota wintering in Britain

Its certainly identified some key sites offshore that we were completely unaware of. It’s also re-emphasised some of the well known site in the past by increasing the number of birds that we actually believe are there..

The problem though is that time is not on our side there’s a new urgency to all this survey work with the threat of dredging, shell fisheries and now offshore wind farms looming. …….Tony Fox……...

There are currently wind turbine proposals right the way out throughout the Baltic from Lithuania  and  Latvia ,Estonia all the way through Poland ,through German waters   and then in the north sea ,in , in the Netherlands ,Belgium off  France and of course round British waters, everywhere  where common skotas occur  they are now being threatened by wind farm developments.

The first phase in the development of electricity generation from offshore wind farms

In Britain dubbed round 1,.began with  proposals for 20 farms at various locations around the coast. Responsibility for leasing portions of the seabed for their development lies with the crown estate which owns the seabed out to the 12 nautical mile territorial limit

Caroline Heaps is the marine environmental policy manager for the crown estate and I asked her to explain the criteria for assessing lease applications

There were various criteria which were put down which  actually controlled the size and scale of the wind farm themselves. So in those procedures the crown estates put a maximum number of thirty turbines for each wind farm site and covering no more than

ten square kilometres.

 Now the actual criteria that developers look for in siting wind farms is obviously            constrained by various factors. They are physical constraints so for example

they are all going to be in relatively shallow water,,the majority of are up to 7 to11

metres of water certainly no more than 20metres of water at the moment and

that’s really constrained  because of  the technology that’s available and  also

distance from shore is fairly important too because as cabling is very expensive, and also proximity to the grid onshore as well.

So they also tend to be relatively close to the shore at the moment  and of course procedures for round 1 actually constrains development  to the 12 nautical mile limit anyway.

What sort of size are the turbines themselves.

In terms of height, I suppose looking from the sea level up to the tip of the turbine blades we’re looking at about 150 metres The top of the turbine foundation itself, that’s separate from the blade would be about 80 metres above the sea surface.

Now of course we’re at a very early stage in terms of  electricity generation by offshore wind farm in the UK but what is the current status, how much electricity is generated by the one wind farm that exists here.

Well the one wind farm that has actually been constructed which is at Blyth off the Northumberland coast only consists of two turbines of 2MW each so it’s a fairly small amount at the moment but with the current proposals for Round 1 where we are looking at potentially 20 wind farm sites, each wind farm site itself bearing in mind that it’s about 30 turbines, could provide 90 MW and that would provide electricity for about 50000 homes.

Now as we already heard the shallow offshore area so favoured by wind farm developers are also the prime habitat for common skota and other birds, but so far

we  just don’t have enough information to evaluate the likely level of impact We can however learn something from similar experiences in other countries

Denmark for example is a few years ahead of us in offshore wind farm development and faces the same potential clash with huge numbers of wintering common skotas

Tony fox again….

:

Denmark’s been at the forefront of wind generation of electricity for many years   and really our little land has become to be rather full of wind turbines and so it was natural   in 1991  that there was a little test plant set up at a place called Vinderby in the south of Denmark where  11 x 450 Kw turbines were placed a little way offshore and that was as far as I know this is the first offshore marine wind farm anywhere on the planet and really that was the start of the process.

There was another slightly larger wind farm built at a place called TunaKnob in1995 but it was in 1998really when the government made a commitment to generate half its consumed electricity here at home from renewable resources. And really that was when the whole offshore wind farm business started. As a result of a plan called Energy 21 it was proposed that 5 large demonstration wind farms would be constructed  in off shore areas, really as a test bed to see the economic feasibility of these things and to look at the engineering challenge posed by working in a quite a severe offshore environment  but  also highly dependent on   environmental impact assessment .One of the reasons for choosing the 5 sites was to look at how these wind farms were likely to affect the environment

Now the farms were originally planned at different places around Denmark one was set up  at a place called Hornsrel on the west coast of Denmark but the rest were in the baltic  areas, two to the south in a place called Hosengesa  in the Danish waters south of Fune          and another big one was set up south of an island called Laesoe  in the Kattergat on the east side of Jutland.

This is an area  which supports up to 900000 wintering skotas and  is possibly the most

important site in the world for common skota  and so it is a very important site

My role really was to be involved with looking at the Environmental Impact of these or   large offshore wind farm developments and to see whether or not they were benign in terms of their impact on the environment.

Research in Denmark could help us to assess the wind farms after they become operational

 Really the critical things that we’re interested in was looking at collision risk, obviously if birds collide with these turbines they are likely to be either injured or killed. 

We were interested as well in the sort of habitat loss. I n general terms this is probably isn’t a great problem because the casons which support the turbines are actually rather  small ,they are normally  rammed into the soft substrata so they don’t destroy a huge area of  the seabed but what we are  more concerned about is that if birds for one or another reason avoid the turbines because they don’t like the moving arms, if they stay away from them , then clearly that’s net habitat loss although we haven’t destroyed the fish stocks which  swim around  in the water or the shellfish which live in the substrata at the bottom of the sea.  If birds avoid these areas then that habitat is effectively lost even though it’s still there, it’s lost to the birds.

Another big concern for Tony and his colleagues is that once the farms are up and running there’s inevitably  going to be a lot of support activity around the turbines by maintenance crews

There will be 2x6 monthly maintenance visits every year. Now that means there is going to be a boat and a team out for at least 4 or5 hours ,two times  a year and our experience so far suggests that there will also be between 3and 5 breakdowns per annum for each  of the turbines so that means in every  year there’s going to be between 5 and 7 visits on average to each turbine. Now if each one, each visit takes 4 to5 hours and the guys have got to get out there in the boats and back  again you can see that effectively this means a whole day of people out at there in the wind farms and the thing we’re worried about is that you only need between 50 and 70 turbines to have a daily visit of a boat  and a crew out there throughout the year .So this is another risk that there’s going to be a lot of human disturbance in areas where the birds were formally able to feed undisturbed. 

One thing we do know is that common skotas are very sensitive birds, some would even say   neurotic, they’re far more skittish than say common eider ducks which are much more  tolerant of humans and human activity.

The very hint of a boat a few hundred metres away and common skotas dive for cover

They are particularly nervous when they are moulting which I suppose  is understandable because they cant fly and are therefore much more susceptible to predators

Now it’s the impossible to predict impact of maintenance crew around the turbines but the fact that skotas are such nervous birds surely doesn’t bode well so what do the offshore windfarm developers have to do in this country in terms of Environmental  Impact Assessment to identitfy such potential problems and to ensure minimal disruption to wild life and the marine environment….

Caroline Heaps of the Crown Estate

Once they have all the necessary consents from the government department from the              regulatory body and that obviously comes under the electricity act but it also includes

the third environmental  protection .act   the coast protection act as well

then the crown estates can actually be in a position to give them the full lease to actually  go ahead and start constructing  the wind farm itself, so they have to undertake                  those environmental impact assessments as part of the electricity act conditions and they really take well over a year to get all those environmental studies undertaken, particularly when they’re  relating to the bird issues, its important that several seasons monitoring is taken into account in  those environmental statements.

But according to Baz Hughes, Its all very well conducting environmental impact assessments but he wants to be sure they’ll be no fast tracking, with specific assurance that minimal disruption to wild life will be a key aspect of the licensing system

We’d like to try and make sure these developments minimise the impact on skota or even that we have mitigation for it , but at the very least we’d like to believe that, these developments fully for example, go ahead in key skota areas

 It’s an ironic situation because, offshore wind farms, the whole idea is they .are environmentally friendly and also provide alternative sources of energy but they’re causing problems in themselves, or they could cause problems in themselves.

Yes, as an organisation we have a policy to support renewable energy, it seems a sensible way to go. The main thing we would point out though that we have to make sure that the environmental impact assessments which are necessary are conducted correctly and that because we have such a lack of baseline information that baseline evidence is collected before and after those developments  and if the before data suggests that there are huge

concentrations of common skota then we would be strongly suggesting that those developments are  tweaked in a certain way  for example maybe try not to build them in a10metre depth until the technology  exists to build them at   20 or 50 metres then build them there rather than in the main skota areas

Also there’s an added complexity in that any developments now need to take account of the cumulative effect on the developments on the skotas so when the impact assessment has been conducted it isn’t sufficient just to say well no bad effect there we’ll have one off the north coast of Wales

or  one off the ….

 To put it in the population context for common skota there needs to be studies done which are  actually modelling that effect and predicting the impact.

The Crown Estate has found a way of ensuring that the developers themselves contribute to various monitoring and   research programmes that are so urgently needed.

…Caroline Heaps again………;

In one of the procedures each of the developers that pre qualified for a site had to put down a financial deposit and the interest that is accruing on the deposit is actually held in a separate account and there is a substantial amount now sitting in that fund for generic research.

So how do you actually co ordinate the generic research and decide what funding goes where.

 The generic research is actually administered by a steering group           we call that steering group COWRIE, which is an acronym for collaborative offshore wind farm research into environment

COWRIE is made up of a number of representatives from organisations such as English Nature,  Countryside Council for W ales, JNCC RSPB CEFAS  DTI,  the industry itself the British Wind Energy Association  andso we’ve got a huge amount of expertise on that group

So the kind of work that  COWRIE is identifying as needed  is specifically things like sea bird surveys

.

Yes there’s one that is looking a  the different types of bird survey methadology and the intention is that that will provide a guidance manual for developers  on how they should be undertaking their bird surveys, which type of survey they  should be undertaking

and the various requirements and data output so there’s some consistency in standardisation amongst the approach.There’s also another research project we hope to award very soon which will be looking at the link between skota and their feeding habitats. Many of the wind farms are located or will be located on shallow sand bank areas and some of .these shallow sand bank areas, particularly up in the north west are important feeding areas for common skota and the whole project will be looking at what  the skota are actually feeding on and the link between the distribution  and density of skota and their feeding habits and also whether they are going to be displaced from those areas by wind farm development.

We’ve already commissioned one research contract. that’s actually looking at the electromagnetic fields that are being generated from the cables between the turbines and also those that come ashore. And trying to identify what impact those electromagnetic fields might have on a particular fish species 

But we’re faced with a catch 22 situation we need to learn more about the likely impact of offshore wind farms on skotas and other wild life  before its too late and yet wind farms need to be built in order to make a proper evaluation. There was going to be an opportunity for such an evaluation for the significant  population of skota in Denmark

. but then there was a  change of  government in 2001 and the new government decided not to make such a huge  commitment  to renewable  in the immediate future

As a result only 2 wind farm developments are underway. and they’re not in areas favoured by large numbers of common skota so that’s good  news for the skotas but bad news for the scientists

The irony of the situation isn’t lost on Tony Fox

The most important area for common skotas in Denmark this area called the Southern Kattergat  south of Laesoe, in that area unfortunately if you like,one of the windmill farms that was proposed for  that area has now been formally cancelled so for the moment its unlikely that anything will go ahead there and the one chance we had to really understand how these birds react  has been lost .for the time being, which of course is good news for the skotas in that area but at the same time  it would  be very useful for us to  be able to understand how  they  do respond once the turbines are in  position and in fact we had already negotiated with the company to move the proposed wind mill farm in that area to an area of low density so that we knew we wouldn’t be affecting the areas of highest common skota  concentration in that area  specifically so that we would avoid the worst conflict but at the same time gain some knowledge about how the birds react.

But for Britain, is all this going to be too little too late   Aren’t we still scrabbling around trying to fill in enormous gaps in our knowledge whilst the wind farms are actually being built. After all full leases have already been granted for 3 new offshore wind farms one at Scroby Sands off Great Yarmouth and 2 others off the coast of North Wales at North  Hoyle and Rhyll Flatts  Construction at North Hoyle could start as early as this summer…Caroline Heaps…..

…

There are about 8 other applications waiting for decisions to be made and assuming that some of those applications will be successful this year, construction will start on those sites well before 2005

Also the time frame were talking about between construction and becoming operational

Well most of the developers actually hope they will be able to put their maximum of 30 turbines in in one season. It very much depends on the availability of the various barges

and ships and so on that are actually going to put in those turbines and the pile driving mechanisms and so on but it also might be conditioned by some of the consents as well

because if construction is going to be limited for certain time periods because of the potential environmental impact particularly on some of the bird species and the potential disturbance factor then some sites may have to actually spread construction over a longer period

So is it simply a case of proceeding with caution or should we put everything on hold until more information does become available. Well Baz.Hughes has mixed feelings

 Small wind farms sited in areas of low skota densities and off migration routes probably won’t have a great impact  however if you have very  large wind farms covering large areas whereby they are going to cut across migration paths them  maybe you would  then    expect a problem.

Of course it all adds a  sense of urgency   to all the research work and survey work that you  are doing

Absolutely again the time scale for developments of the offshore wind farms is upon   We have the first 18 wind farms planned at the moment. We have a  second tranche .coming on line shortly, obviously there is the pressure from government to have these plans in place the wind farms and sites in place   but if we’re speaking we’ve got to make sure were continually reminding the different government departments  about what their obligations are for the wildlife that these sites support.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of all this is that offshore wind farms are just one of  the many real and potential threats to common skotas and so its wrong to consider the wind farm issue in isolation. And this is what concerns Tony Fox in Denmark

 We are worried that this is the sort of salami effect it is death by 1000 cuts. Although it is a common and widely distributed bird its suffering a lot through loss of habitat loss of food and now the development of offshore wind farms. And obviously we’re concerned. It doesn’t mean to say that we want to stop wind farms by any   means  

Because there’s no doubt that offshore development will make a huge contribution to renewable energy throughout western Europe but we just need to be mindful of the fact that these birds may and suffer and what we are keen to do is to find solutions to the potential conflict so that if you like, trying to save the environment by generating electricity from wind power doesn’t cost the local nature in terms of the sea duck populations that use the very waters where these wind farms will be developed

The irony is that in Britain conservation groups have been campaigning for more environmentally friendly energy generation for decades and now that the government is actually doing something about it we realise  that it comes at a price.It’s the local wildlife common skotas amongst them already established in some key areas where wind farms are planned that looks likely to pay that price

.The big question is should we just bite the bullet in favour of renewable energy.

It’s a subject we’ll be watching with great interest and we’ll report back as our knowledge of skotas and the wind farm industry develops.

Nature was presented by Mike Cawardine and produced by Sheena  Duncan