Compiled with the help of artificial intelligence, based on Spanish-language information. Source below the article.
Residents of La Cruz Santa, in the northern Tenerife municipality of Los Realejos, have now collected 6,150 signatures against a propane gas plant they regard as dangerous and polluting at a time when the region is supposedly committed to alternative energy sources.
The figure was announced at a meeting held this Saturday by the neighbourhood group, which was formed after the Disa installation was ruled out for another part of the Valle de La Orotava municipality, at La Zamora. As in that earlier case, the campaign enjoys the backing of every political group on the council (PP, PSOE and CC), yet that has failed to stop the regional government pressing ahead with the necessary steps to grant authorisation and publish the project in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands on the second of this month.
Growing support and a sense of resignation
Although these residents have won growing popular support and gestures of solidarity, including videos shared on social media by La Cruz Santa locals who see the works and the project as an attack on their community, they make little effort to hide their resignation and near-helplessness. They believe the initiative will not be halted and that they will end up living alongside a plant they are convinced will clearly cost them their quality of life and, above all, their safety.
At this point, they highlight what they see as a contradiction on the part of the regional government: while it backs the plant, grants the necessary permits and publishes the decisions in the BOC, one of its vice-presidents, the former Los Realejos mayor Manuel Domínguez (PP), is encouraging residents and the council itself to appeal against his own executive’s decisions. The paradox is all the more striking given that the permits depend on a department belonging to his own party, the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Energy, headed by Mariano Hernández Zapata from La Palma. Domínguez made his remarks in a recent interview on Radio Realejos, the municipal station he knows well.
Neighbours vow to keep up the fight
The residents, however, will carry on with their campaign, continuing to gather supporting signatures and setting out their deep misgivings about an installation they consider not only dangerous but nonsensical in an era of clean energy, however much the regional government and the company present it as essential to stave off a possible energy blackout in the current circumstances.
On Friday 2 October, the BOC published eight notices relating to this propane gas plant, which went down very badly with the members of the neighbourhood group and demonstrates the determination of the Canary Islands government, and specifically of the PP faction within it, to keep the project in Los Realejos despite unanimous rejection at the local council (where the conservatives hold an absolute majority but have even backed opposition motions brought by the PSOE).
This push for the project deepened the group’s resignation about the chances of reversing it, their uncertainty over the future of the neighbourhood and this part of the municipality, and their outrage that the regional government is not listening to the residents opposed to it and, above all, to a full council meeting that is unanimously against it.
Fears over air quality in the valley
For those affected and for critics of propane gas, the solution should under no circumstances involve a “mega-installation with eight towers ten metres high, fed by hundreds of cubic metres of propane, a highly flammable fossil fuel.”
They also stress that “nitrogen oxide emissions from a thermal generation facility are air pollutants that can contribute to the formation of other harmful compounds. And we live in a valley where the atmosphere has no borders. We have our well-known panza de burro, which frequently blankets the Valle de La Orotava. Just as the calima brings us dust from Africa, air pollution knows nothing of municipal boundaries or borders,” they point out.
They therefore ask why “the air quality, our crops and our precious valley are to be put at risk by installing a fossil fuel plant next to our homes.” They further stress that “it is time to show that not everything goes. Our health and our livelihoods are not up for negotiation. You cannot endanger the safety of an entire valley where thousands of us live (some 110,000, plus the floating tourist population) to serve the interests of an energy company. And we do not understand how, in taking this decision, the situation of local residents, of IES Cruz Santa and of CEIP Mencey Bentor, located just a few metres from the installation, has not even been sufficiently taken into account. Where is the protection for residents?”
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