Environmental association Almargem has criticised plans to build what would become Europe’s biggest solar plant near the sleepy Algarve town of Alcoutim, considering them to be “unsustainable, inadequate and lacking in credibility”.
The announcement came this week after the project’s environmental impact study (EIA) was made available for public discussion.
In a statement, the association says that building the solar plant means “occupying and destroying a 600-hectare mountainside area”.
Although Almargem says it supports “energy systems that do not depend on fossil fuels”, it defends building “several smaller solar plants on abandoned farms or areas of land that aren’t protected”.
The association also says the land in Martinlongo and Vaqueiros “is hilly” and thus “inappropriate” for the project. Plus, the association mentioned that there are “extremely important archaeological findings” in the area that need to be studied further, as well as many kinds of trees, which would be destroyed.
On a closing note, the environmentalists say the technology that will be used is “obsolete” and that there is “more efficient equipment on the market, capable of producing the same amount of energy in a smaller area”.
