Wind farms occupy fire-prone terrain but show no evidence of targeting burnt land: a multi-scale, time-ordered analysis for Greece

Stavros Stromatas 

A recurring claim in Greek public discourse holds that wildfires are set to clear land for wind farms, so that turbines end up on burnt ground. We test this with a design built to avoid the base-rate fallacy of simple overlap statistics, comparing the operational Greek wind fleet against wind-viable land with a use-availability case-control model and a time-ordered survival model, on a scale ladder from the parcel to 5 km. At the parcel scale there is no association, and thus no site-level targeting. A landscape-scale association (2 to 5 km) appears when administrative licences are weighted equally, at an odds ratio near 1.6, and near 1.4 after a fuel covariate. It is an artifact of the unit: it is absent for individual turbines, and absent when turbines are grouped into physical clusters rather than by licence at every grouping distance from 300 m to 3 km, appearing only for the administrative licence, whose boundaries subdivide interleaved developments in shared fire-prone terrain. Placing each fire at its satellite-detected ignition rather than its extent, turbines are no nearer to ignitions than random wind-viable land, at every unit. The time-ordered test is inconclusive, and the median fire-to-installation gap is 6 to 7 years. The evidence supports neither deliberate burning to build nor preferential siting on burnt land: wind farms occupy fire-prone terrain because wind and fire coincide on the same dry, exposed uplands.