Brutes with clean energy

In the Balearic Islands, the debate on renewable energy has taken such an absurd turn that it's difficult to distinguish where sustainability ends and opportunism begins. Following the avalanche of solar farms that has invaded rural land—without zoning, without any landscape or land-use planning criteria—the next wave has arrived: lithium battery parks. Thirty-four projects are already with the Regional Ministry, in various stages of processing, according to Jaume Perelló. Thirty-four in total, seven of them in Alcudia alone.

The debate isn't about the energy transition, which is essential. The problem is that here it's being done haphazardly and with a total disregard for the land. If solar farms have already transformed productive areas into a brickyard of panels, battery storage facilities add another layer of degradation: metal containers lined up like logistics warehouses, concrete slabs, pipe installations, wiring, and an irreversible impact. It's land that's lost, probably forever.

Moreover, we're not talking about harmless installations. Lithium storage systems are highly polluting if spills occur and carry fire risks that can be very difficult to control. Any minimal research confirms this: the so-called thermal runawaySpontaneous fires associated with lithium mining can last for days and release toxic smoke. And here, on these fragile and small islands, we want to scatter dozens of them across the countryside as if it were nothing. This idea would be grotesque if it weren't so dangerous.

Meanwhile, the investment funds that have colonized the renewable energy business continue to sell these projects as models of sustainability. They do so with a monumental crutch: demanding public subsidies to install industrial infrastructure on rural land while presenting themselves as saviors of the planet. It's very perverse. And, what's more, it's a lie.

In any case, devastating the countryside is not sustainable. Turning the territory into a playing field for investors isn't either. We could conduct a test that might be profitable for us: if we prohibited the installation of solar panels and batteries on rural land, solutions would surely emerge in industrial parks, on rooftops, and in warehouses within months. But as long as the countryside remains the cheapest, fastest, and least problematic place—politically and economically speaking—it will continue to be the first to fall. And the vultures will return, because that's what they live on: anything that smells of death (and easy money).

The energy transition cannot, under any circumstances, be an excuse to repeat the same mistakes we've always made. Either we stand up to this covert colonization of the land, or one day we'll realize that, in the name of sustainability, we've destroyed precisely what we wanted to protect.