Beached Newquay Fin Whale 'Got Rid Of' In Just Two Days Whilst Offshore Floating Wind Farm Surveys Are Ongoing

That Fin Whale which beached at Newquay a few days ago and which sparked the atrocious Guardian article asking how we should best ‘get rid of’ dead whales which I looked at here:

That Fin Whale has already been ‘got rid of’, which is very quick for a council which has taken two years not to get around to collecting residents’ household waste in new wheelie bins. Two years and Cornwall Council still hasn’t got around to doing regular wheelie bin collections, yet a dead whale washes up on a Newquay beach and they chop it up and dispose of it in two days! Makes you wonder why.

The dead fin whale which washed up on a Cornwall beach this week has been removed by diggers to be disposed of, Cornwall Council has confirmed.

The 16.5m mammal was discovered on the tide line washed up at Fistral Beach in Newquay on Wednesday (November 15), which prompted Devon and Cornwall Police to cordon off the area while members of the Marine Strandings Network from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and officials from Cormac attended to take biopsy samples and figure out how to remove and dispose of it.

The cordon remained in place for 24 hours at the beach including yesterday when diggers and trucks were spotted on the sand at low tide chopping up the carcass and putting the bits into lorries to be taken away. The tail fin was even spotted in a large blue skip on North Fistral car park waiting to be taken away.

There had been concerns that the animal might be buried in the sand, but Cornwall Council insisted it was never an option for public health reasons as animals decay and can blow up because of building up gases, which is why the whale, which was too big to crane out in a single piece, had to be chopped up first.

A spokesman for Cornwall Council said: "The remains were removed from the beach by the end of Thursday afternoon following a difficult and complex operation. They will now be disposed of in line with public health guidelines."

Despite the fact that naturally exploding whales are extremely rare, the media and the authorities were telling people to ‘stay away’ because the dead Fin Whale might explode at any moment. Cornwall Wildlife Trust are quoted as saying the carcass had a "high risk of blowing up." I’m not sure I *trust* Cornwall Wildlife Trust on that particular point. It’s obvious that the authorities didn’t want too many prying eyes around the corpse. Why is that?

Perhaps it’s got something to do with the fact that a floating wind farm is being planned in the waters of the Celtic Sea off the north coast of Cornwall, not very far from where the whale was washed up? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that acoustic sea bed surveys for that floating wind farm development are probably being carried out at this very moment? Perhaps Big Wind and its filthy rich Green backers don’t want no stinking whale carcasses washing up on their ‘planet saving clean energy’ projects? I can only guess but the facts are as follows:

Falck Renewables and BlueFloat Energy looking at early delivery in Celtic Sea

5th January 2022

With grid connections secured and almost a year’s worth of bird surveys already completed, plans for Falck Renewables’ and BlueFloat Energy’s Llywelyn and Petroc floating offshore wind farms are advancing at a pace.   

Located respectively in Welsh and English waters off the coasts of Pembrokeshire and Devon, and with a 300MW target installed capacity for each, Llywelyn (llywelynwind.co.uk) and Petroc (petrocwind.co.uk) will make a significant contribution to meeting the 1GW target for floating offshore wind in the UK by 2030.

These sites have been selected following an extensive assessment process which included the review of protected areas, environmental impact, cable routing, existing infrastructure, marine traffic, and fishing activity.

Falck Renewables and BlueFloat Energy are also actively engaged with the supply chain in Wales and the South West, and are planning on developing a local manufacturing base for offshore wind. Based on Falck and BlueFloat’s extensive knowledge of floating wind, the partnership will select technologies that can maximise existing regional infrastructure while optimising new investments.

With connection agreements signed with National Grid in August and September 2021, the partnership believes that a swift development of these 300MW projects will play a major role in the development of a floating wind industry in the Celtic Sea, and will be instrumental as a stepping stone for larger developments by the end of the decade to help meet the 2035 4GW target announced by The Crown Estate in November 2021.

Here’s a map of those sites:

Here’s the location of the proposed Petroc floating wind farm:

According to Petroc, surveys are scheduled for 2023:

Reuters reports:

March 21 - The UK Crown Estate's decision to invest in offshore wind surveys in the Celtic Sea is set to help the UK floating wind sector make the important step up to commercial arrays.

In December, the Crown Estate issued contracts for the first metocean surveys off the southwest coast of England and Wales. Work on them will begin this spring, with some datasets made available to participants ahead of seabed lease auctions scheduled for mid-2023.

The leases will accommodate large floating wind arrays of several hundred megawatts capacity, allowing developers to apply economies of scale to pilot project learnings. ACS Group’s 50 MW Kincardine array in Scotland is currently the largest floating windfarm in operation.

The full survey programme will analyse seabed geophysical and geotechnical properties, including wind, wave and current patterns, as well as marine wildlife.

The surveys should help developers refine the layouts of arrays and anchor designs, key factors in the scaling up of floating wind projects, Tom Hill, program manager at Marine Energy Wales and chair of the Celtic Sea Developer Alliance, said.

So yeah, it’s just purely coincidence that whilst acoustic surveys for wind farm developments are probably happening off the north Cornwall coast, a juvenile of the world’s second largest whale species washes up on a Newquay beach and there has been a military-style operation to carry out a post-mortem and dispose of the corpse within 48 hours, with authorities telling the public to keep away citing ‘DANGER - UXW’ (unexploded whale).