The president blames external companies for the stoppage of the Areté and La Roca wind farms and demands compensation
SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 7 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Pedro Martín, has assured this Tuesday, during the celebration of an extraordinary plenary session, that the insular Government has carried out an “enormous job to resolve all the irregularities that existed in ITER, which are many and very serious”.
Thus, he has given as an example “decisions made without legal or economic reports; loans between group companies that were not repaid –more than 18 million euros–; more than 47 workers in fraud of the law; freehand service contracts, some amounting to more than 100,000 euros; the non-existence of urban planning permits and illegal connections to the electrical network or non-drinking water supplies, are some of the examples of the mess that this government group found when it took over ITER” .
“We are going to continue working not only to put an end to the multiple irregularities that we have found, but also to continue improving the very important public service that ITER provides,” he said in a note sent by the corporation.
In this sense, he highlighted the actions carried out so that “the capacity of the Teide supercomputer has multiplied by 110 percent, scientific production has increased by 115 percent during this mandate and that it is already in a transformation process of latest generation wind turbines to replace a good part of those that exist right now”.
Martín indicated that the “priority objective is to bring ITER up to date and get it out of an unfortunate situation.”
On the other hand, the president also referred to the stoppage of wind turbines that occurred in the last stretch of 2022, of which he said that “once any problem attributable to ITER was identified and ruled out, an audit was carried out that determined that there are technical problems external to the institute, which had to be resolved by the owner of the substation or, where appropriate, by the company in charge of maintenance”.
Pedro Martín also stressed that the Cabildo has launched all the assessments and processes “to demand responsibilities and compensate for the lower income that has occurred”, and recalled that “the work of ITER and its staff has been at all times flawless”.
QUESTION IF ALONSO FALLS IN “INCOMPATIBILITY” WHEN ADVISING COMPANIES
The insular president also asked the spokesman for the Canary Islands Coalition group, Carlos Alonso, “if he works or has worked as an adviser to companies that are in conflict with the Cabildo, which would mean a breach of the incompatibility law”, but Alonso opted for Do not answer.
The CC-PNC group, for its part, put on the table the million-dollar losses for the island corporation that led to the paralysis of the Areté and La Roca wind farms.
The nationalist counselor, Antolín Bueno, has indicated that “neither Pedro Martín nor Enrique Arriaga have given explanations or have assumed responsibilities, Martín has directly accused the companies Iberdrola and Energías Ecológicas de Tenerife of being responsible for the stoppage of the parks”.
If that is the case, he indicated, “we demand that you urgently take legal action to recover the money for the citizens because there has been significant patrimonial damage to the Cabildo.”
Antolín Bueno pointed out that “the president’s explanation does not coincide with the report made by the wind energy department delivered on May 12, 2021 to the ITER Board of Directors, where it clearly indicates the urgent need to contract maintenance for the correct operation of parks”.
The reality, he continued, “is that they did not act responsibly and did not hire him and the parks were paralyzed in August 2022.”
The nationalist adviser notes that “Pedro Martín’s nervousness is evident, to the point that he has wanted to divert the subject with other matters, the PSOE’s mismanagement is manifest” and maintained that “the responsibility is his.”
“We are going to continue collecting information to, where appropriate, demand responsibilities where necessary,” he said in a note sent by the group.
Bueno indicated that the Areté and La Roca wind farms have 18.4 MW and 16.8 MW, respectively, and since their stoppage there has been a loss of approximately 8 million euros.
“So that people understand: a normal family consumes 350 KWh/month, which means 4.2 MWh/year, with the losses accumulated up to now due to the stoppage of these two parks, 8,500 families in Tenerife could have been supplied. for a full year.”
In his opinion, “that is the responsibility of Pedro Martín y Arriaga, who was recently dismissed as head of ITER, today they have not been able to offer a credible explanation of what has happened.”
The insular group Sí Podemos Canarias has demanded in the extraordinary plenary session that responsibilities be purged in the “nonsense of ITER” and that the technical management of the company be assumed “at once, after a public call, with all the legal guarantees, of course it can be otherwise.”
The insular councilor of the purple formation, Cristo González, recalled that “the government group came promising that it would relaunch ITER and yet it has continued with a very deficient management of human resources, a legacy of years of bad policy from the Canary Islands Coalition , but that has not been able to be reversed in these almost four years of legislature due to lack of ambition”.
Cristo González has called for “valuing ITER as a tool to democratize energy on the island” and has also highlighted the need for ITER “to have public instruments that promote self-consumption and distributed generation of renewable energy through projects with the participation of local communities and with democratic control and management”.
“We believe in ITER as a perfectly viable technological platform to work in favor of energy sovereignty and the democratization of the sector,” González stated.
The councilor of Podemos has once again opted for the creation of an insular public energy company and has also wanted to highlight “the importance of the public to avoid, as far as possible, the intervention of private interests in strategic sectors such as precisely that of energy”.
For this counselor “ITER is just the tip of the iceberg of a total lack of energy planning on the island.”
The progressive formation also highlights that “apart from the enormous doubts about the exemplary nature of legality and the management of public resources, ITER always had an image of technical solvency, a strong company, endowed with qualified personnel who provided innovation to the productive development of the island, leading a technological commitment in favor of a sustainable energy transition” for which they regret “this unpleasant situation in which it is being involved”.
