I-DE, Iberdrola España's distribution company, renews an agreement with the Government of La Rioja to protect birdlife, to adapt more than 250 electricity pylons over three years
- This agreement will complete the adaptation of all the existing pylons in the Autonomous Community of La Rioja’s Special Bird Protection Areas.
The Director General for the Natural Environment and Landscape, Ignacio Sáenz de Urturi, and the representative of i-DE Smart Electrical Grids, Carlos Sobrino, signed a new three-year collaboration agreement today to adapt the electricity pylons to improve the protection of birdlife through actions aimed at preventing incidents involving birds on power lines located in the so-called ‘protection zones’.
I-DE, Iberdrola España's distribution company, plans to adapt more than 250 electricity pylons in La Rioja in birdlife protection areas over the next three years, intervening on high-voltage power lines in accordance with the provisions of Royal Decree 1432/2008. The Government of La Rioja will define and prioritise the lines action should be done on, based on its knowledge and experience of birdlife areas and habitats in the region, as well as the impact power lines have on them.
Ignacio Sáenz de Urturi stressed that, through this agreement, over its 27 years, ‘nearly €2.3 M have been invested in correcting power lines, work has been carried out on 151 power lines, 1,668 pylons have been corrected and 583 spans have been signalled to prevent accidents involving birds, meaning that between the two actions, work has been carried out on more than 388 kilometres of power lines‘.
With this information, i-DE will apply the most appropriate bird protection measures in each case. In addition, the company has undertaken to adapt, whenever action is required, the five high-voltage line pylons it owns closest to the point wherever an incident involving birds classified as vulnerable or endangered is detected.
Carlos Sobrino pointed out that ‘the adaptation attempts to put enough distance between the live and neutral pylons so that birds don’t come into contact with both when perching or flying off’.
A catalogue of actions has been designed to improve the pylons depending on their configuration, such as lining the different phases and connections, increasing the safety distance by changing the insulators to lengthen the chain and providing rod-type insulators, replacing crossarms with special ones designed to protect birds, installing anti-nesting devices as well as other measures.
Last year 2024, i-DE carried out a total of 28 interventions in La Rioja, both in Special Bird Protection Areas and in other enclaves, modifying a total of 220 pylons, with an investment of over €400 k.
Meeting the objective set out in this agreement will make it possible to complete the adaptation of all the existing distribution grid pylons in the Special Bird Protection Areas in the Autonomous Community of La Rioja.
27 years working together to protect birdlife
This new agreement continues the work that the Government of La Rioja and Iberdrola España have been carrying out for 27 years to establish preventive and corrective measures to reduce bird accidents with power lines to protect endangered bird species.
In 1998, La Rioja was one of the first regions in the country to adopt regulations governing power lines to protect birdlife, behind only Andalusia, Navarre and Extremadura. To develop the objectives of these regulations, that same year the regional government and Iberdrola España signed their first agreement and since then both organisations have worked on surveying and taking an inventory of dangerous power lines and correcting them, financing the actions in these areas on a 50/50 basis.
Both the legislation developed by the Autonomous Communities and Royal Decree 1432/2008, which regulates the matter at the national level, have established a series of technical standards applicable to high-voltage overhead power lines to eliminate or reduce their impact on birdlife. Since 1998, in the case of the Autonomous Community of La Rioja, new electrical installations have incorporated the protection measures.
The actions financed by this agreement focus on adapting the pylons installed before that date to ensure that in the short term all the installations in the electricity distribution grid in La Rioja do not put birdlife at risk.
