Renewable energy – including wind – is due to play a much more significant role in South Africa's energy mix. Interest in solar, hydroelectric, biomass, and wind has surged amid the country's growing power crisis, typified by protracted bouts of load shedding as Eskom struggles to stabilise its ageing coal-fired fleet.
This transition to renewables has recently been boosted by regulatory reprieves, which have allowed municipalities to procure power independently, raised licensing thresholds, and doubled the amount of new generation capacity procured through Bid Window 6.
And although the red tape around renewables is being eased to get power pumped into the grid as a matter of urgency, like the exclusion of certain solar PV facilities from needing an environmental assessment, there are still strict protocols in place to protect the country's flora and fauna.
Concerns around wind turbines' impact on bird populations are especially strong.
A single wind turbine in South Africa kills around four birds each year, according to BirdLife South Africa. These fatality rates are similar to those recorded in North America and Europe, with daytime raptors accounting for the most fatalities, followed by songbirds. It's further estimated that wind turbines in South Africa are likely to kill a million bats by 2050.
The Cape Vulture is a large bird weighing, on average, 9kg with a wingspan of 2.55 metres. Endemic to Southern Africa, the Cape Vulture, classified as endangered and more recently vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, has a large foraging range, covering thousands of square kilometres.
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It's not an agile flier, due to its large wingspan, and its broad foraging range, mostly flying lower than 100 metres above the ground, puts the Cape Vulture on a collision course with rotor blades atop wind turbines, according to BirdLife South Africa.
This "collision risk potential" has informed a specific protocol, developed and recently published by the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment, to protect Cape Vultures.
"This protocol provides the criteria for the specialist assessment and minimum report content requirements for determining impacts on Cape Vultures associated with the development of onshore wind energy generation facilities, which require environmental authorisation," noted the department in a gazette published on Friday.
The first step in the Cape Vulture specialist assessment is a 12-month-long "site sensitivity verification" process that must be undertaken to confirm the collision risk potential for Cape Vultures at the preferred site. This verification must be done by a specialist registered in the field of zoological science with the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP) "with demonstrated expertise in Cape Vulture observation and research" and needs to include the pre-breeding season and the breeding season.
Two people must monitor at the same time for at least 72 hours per vantage point during the 12-month period, which will "determine the level of Cape Vulture flight activity on the site and the height of flight."
This site sensitivity verification report will confirm – or dispute – the environmental sensitivity and contain a motivation, corroborated by evidence, like monitoring data and input from BirdLife Africa, of either the verified or different environmental sensitivity.
The Cape Vulture specialist assessment will also need to reveal "the possible location of vulture restaurants or land uses which could result in carcass availability" attracting the birds to the area. Wind speed and other weather data, that could influence Cape Vulture activity on the site, must also be analysed.
Once all the data has been gathered, it must be compiled in a Cape Vulture Specialist Assessment Report, which will be incorporated into the avian specialist study as part of the Basic Assessment Report or Environmental Impact Assessment Report.
This must include a copy of the SACNASP registration certificate of the zoological scientist who prepared the assessment, a signed statement of independence by the specialist, a description of the methodology used to undertake the data generation, a summary of the findings of the Cape Vulture monitoring, and an indication of the potential annual fatality rate, among a host of other information.
A Cape Vulture post-construction monitoring plan must also be included as part of the report.
