Photovoltaic panels “sterilize the field and increase the risk of fires” or “where a panel is planted, nothing will grow back for decades.” These are the latest hoaxes launched against renewable energy by SOS Rural, a self-proclaimed “non-partisan but not apolitical citizen group” inserted in the Ingenio Foundation, an entity close to Vox that finances agricultural companies in Murcia and known for having misinformed for years about the reasons for the environmental destruction of the Mar Menor.
Last week, the official news agency EFE launched a ticker that was automatically picked up by several media outlets (including elDiario.es, which deleted it as soon as it became aware of its existence) that reproduced a note from September 5 in which SOS Rural expressed “its concern about the lack of regulation in the installation of solar panels on agricultural land” and demanded “that the effects of aggressive pesticides and the overheating of the soil produced by the photovoltaic panels, which sterilize the field, be taken into account.” increasing the risk of fire.
The news ticker stated, reproducing this statement, that the “elephant in the room” of the photovoltaic sector is fires. “More and more experts are expressing their concern about a problem that continues to worsen.” It assured that in 2022 and 2023 “more than 1,000 fires” occurred in this type of installations, most of them in their first year of life, and this summer “was full of fires in photovoltaic installations.” They asked to follow the example of Italy, whose government has banned the installation of solar panels on agricultural land “by regulating the massive ’tiling’ of the countryside” and giving priority to both the protection of farmers and the ecological balance.
José Donoso, the general director of the Spanish Photovoltaic Union (UNEF), refutes on the phone what he calls “intentional lies”, citing for example an article published in the New Yorker last Friday that includes the virtues of photovoltaics. called agrovoltaics in the pollination of bees. Or a study carried out in the United States that shows that five environmental indicators of biodiversity “improve” within photovoltaic plants, such as flowering or diversity and the population of insects.
Donoso points out that “the panels ‘buffer’ the temperatures. In winter they increase them and in summer they reduce them. Regarding fires, he points out that in factories “there can be an incident” as anywhere else, but they are not particularly favourable places. And he denies a lack of regulation in the photovoltaic sector. “It seems that people put the solar panel wherever they want” when “there is a very extensive regulation: just to explain it, the ministry has an 80-page guide. “Spain is not a lawless country,” he says.
“Citizen movement”
The fires and the alleged sterilisation of the countryside due to solar panels are a new chapter in the anti-renewable campaign recently launched by SOS Rural. This “citizen movement” is closely linked to the Ingenio Foundation, whose patrons include major agricultural exporters such as Agromark and Gregal, and to the two main irrigation cooperatives in Murcia. Two of its employers, G’s Spain and Ciky Oro, were fined for their participation in the so-called Topillo affair, a plot to dump brine containing nitrates into the Mar Menor.
There are photographs of Ingenio officials sharing a table and a tablecloth with Vox leader Santiago Abascal, alongside representatives of Murcian agriculture or the former president of Sacyr Luis del Rivero, a large landowner in this region very close to this good party. Ingenio was among the instigators of several hoaxes that infiltrated the agrarian protests at the beginning of the year.
Then, Natalia Corbalán, spokesperson for SOS Rural and CEO of the Ingenio Foundation, assured that “our salads are in the hands of Mohamed VI”, referring to vegetable imports from Morocco. The reality is that Spain is the second largest exporter of fruits and vegetables in the EU and the fourth in the world, according to reports from the Ministry of Agriculture.
In March, SOS Rural hired Javier Poza, who had worked for 14 years in Brussels for the Union of Small Farmers (UPA), one of Spain’s main agricultural unions, as its secretary general, and as an advisor to the political group Renew Europe, in which Ciudadanos was registered.
elDiario.es contacted the Ingenio Foundation on Monday to ask questions such as the scientific basis of their claims about renewable energy, or whether they sympathize with far-right movements and parties. At the time of going to press, no response had been received.
Well versed in disinformation in the energy sector, Pedro Fresco, author of Energy Fakes: Myths and hoaxes about the energy transition, It should be remembered that Ingenio’s main financier is the Community of Irrigators of Campo de Cartagena, which approved in 2023 a contribution of 2.4 million euros to the foundation.
“I don’t know how much of this money goes to organic expenses for the maintenance of the foundation and how much goes to this type of campaign. But as long as it’s relevant, it’s a very important amount of money,” explains Fresco, current director of the Valencian Association of the Energy Sector (AVAESEN) and former general director of the ecological transition of the Generalitat Valenciana.
This expert links the messages of SOS Rural and Ingenio with the radical right-wing discourse of the Dutch Peasant Party. He points out that these lobbies “are reporting real atrocities, such as that we will not be able to eat” because of renewable energy. Remember a video published in August that claimed that the Campo de Cartagena “has been invaded” by solar panels and that “at this rate”, in a decade “the garden will be nothing more than a memory” and Spain will have to import poor quality food from other countries: “waste” containing “toxic substances and GMOs” from abroad, says the video, illustrated by the image of a sick child, presumably suffering from cancer.
What is behind this campaign? According to Fresco, “it may be a certain competition for land use,” but it is fundamentally a political issue. “Ultimately, there is a whole movement in Europe that considers that the environmental regulations from Brussels and the Green Deal are a threat to the interests of the agricultural sector as it is.” Within this Green Deal, renewable energy is a fundamental element. “And they are determined to sink it, that is why they are attacking a lot there. The extreme right is doing it everywhere in Europe.”
As I said a few days ago InfolibreThis summer, SOS made a photo from its X (twitter) account of a solar macroplant viral under the title “Before, it was all the fields. Sign against macroplants before it’s too late”, without specifying that the image corresponded to an installation located in India.
At the end of July, they published a tweet that spoke about the supposed “real impact of a macro solar plant”, in which they calculated that each hectare of panels leaves 162.5 tons of waste once its useful life is over, while photovoltaic developers only have to get rid of this waste. “European regulations already provide for the obligation to recycle the panels at the end of the life of the installations”, Donoso points out.
Another argument they use is that of land occupation, while according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition, renewable energies would occupy 0.8% of the surface area of the Spanish territory if the ambitious objectives envisaged in the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC) were achieved. If we only take into account agricultural land, “it is between 0.2% and 0.4%”, says Donoso.
“Agropolitical Collusion”
A good connoisseur of Ingenio is Pablo Rodríguez Ros from Murcia, environmentalist, oceanographer and author of The Dying Sea. On the phone, he recalls that the origin of the foundation was an attempt to stop the Mar Menor law that the Murcia government will relax in the coming months. Rodríguez Ros describes the discourse of the foundation and SOS Rural as “agropolitical collusion.”
According to him, it is “a small group that has broken away from what has always been done in the Campo de Cartagena region”; they propose to continue the intensive agriculture of recent decades in this region of the country to “position themselves in a very brutal way against all environmental regulations.”
“The underlying problem with the Ingenio Foundation” is that its message “permeates society” because “the public authorities of the Region of Murcia say the same things they have been saying for decades.” The foundation, for Rodríguez Ros, “is nothing more than a scarecrow of everything that has been done for decades, although in a more radical way.”
“Behind them are the same people, as always. Tomorrow the foundation will be dissolved and nothing will change.” “And now they are trying to ride the wave of anti-renewable discourse as another way to divert attention.”
