ESC 8 - MWT on wind farms - video Dailymotion

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Media Isle of Man had the honour of being part of Energy Sustainability Centre's recent 'Roundtable' session, organised by MMC and hosted by Capital International Group.

Transcript

00:00Any development has an impact on nature, but I go back to an earlier point,

00:07Manx Wildlife Trust are 100% that the island needs renewable energy.

00:12So if you take that as a start point, we need to live, we need energy, we need to get it somewhere.

00:18We think renewable energy is the way to do it, we want the right renewables in the right place.

00:22So we've done some due diligence on Orsted, I've met with colleagues from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust,

00:28the CEOs there that have been working with Orsted for a long time, and frankly they give Orsted a fantastic reference,

00:34and there's huge biodiversity net gain projects there.

00:37Now we know Orsted are a company that are making money, but they're ethically making money on something we support.

00:44The question then is, it was really good to hear John say that in the Isle of Man,

00:48because we're an independent nation, we've got the opportunity to do it differently.

00:52So we're nudging Orsted in a way, in a nice way, because we're saying we want our wind farm,

00:57you do great things for biodiversity, but we want ours to blow the others away,

01:01and this to be the best ever wind farm that's ever been built for biodiversity.

01:06Now maybe, and there's barriers to this, and people wiser than me will say that this might not be possible,

01:11but whether that's a black blade, whether that's better things on the pillars underwater,

01:16maybe it's put in in such a way that the sound doesn't impact cetaceans when they're being built in the construction phase,

01:22whatever that looks like, we want our wind farm to be exemplar,

01:27and I want our government to be saying the same thing to Orsted,

01:31because then we work with the right partner who knows exactly how to build a wind farm,

01:35but we nudge them a bit to make ours the best in the world in terms of what biodiversity can look like in the wind farm.

01:41Amazing. Yep.

01:42And we've, you know, Orsted has been doing it for longer than anyone.

01:46We were the first company to put turbines in the water in 1991 in Denmark,

01:50and therefore that body of knowledge to where offshore wind is now and then where it's going to go next,

01:56the number of different projects and opportunities that we've got on our projects around the world

02:01that we've been sharing with Wildlife Trust and with many other organisations,

02:06there are so many things that sometimes people aren't aware of,

02:10but actually, you know, opportunities around the very simple fact that around turbine locations, of course,

02:16there's less disturbance because you don't have intensive fisheries going right up to the positions.

02:22And suddenly, I mean, I was up in Scotland last week and speaking to someone at the University of St Andrews,

02:28and they've been doing studies on grey sea movements around turbine positions

02:32because they discovered new feeding grounds because they're not being disturbed.

02:36There's so many different opportunities to do stuff that actually will leave a benefit.

02:41It's not the case of just coming in and enforcing a development.

02:44And this is, you know, the clues in the name, it's a man's name,

02:48but this is very much the Isle of Man's first offshore wind farm,

02:51but I want it to be the Isle of Man's offshore wind farm and done to suit the island from the end,

02:56because it's about the future here.

ESC 8 - MWT on wind farms

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