Wind Turbines Kill a Few Birds

Guppy06 writes "The Houston Chronicle has an article about how a 7000-turbine windfarm in Altamont Pass, California (the world's largest collection) has killed an estimated 22,000 birds during the past 20 years or so of operation, 'including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors(.)' There are efforts to keep the operators from renewing their permit until they take measures to protect bird populations. To put things in perspective the article goes on to point out that the Exxon Valdez spill is estimated to have killed around 250,000, while the whole story can just about be summed up by one quote by a biologist: 'When you turn on your lights you kill something, no matter what the source of electricity.'" Killing 3-4 birds per day doesn't seem too bad. It's a shame that larger, rarer birds are getting killed, but... How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?

Comments

Solution ?

[zeux]

Why not put big metal grid around each turbine ?

My fan here has one so I can't put my fingers in. Maybe we could use grid with larger holes so the flow of wind wouldn't be disturbed too much and so it would prevent bigger birds of going through.

I think it would cause some extra noise (wind going through the grid), cost some extra money and maybe lower the wind speed a little (and by the way lower efficiency) but that would definitely save the birds.

But maybe 22000 birds over 20 years (that's a little more than 3 birds a day) are not worth the expense...

Any solution with magnetic fields? I know that some birds use magnetic fields during their flight to find their destination... It could also help keeping birds out of the highway (60 millions/year in car collision ??? That's a LOT).

Kill 22,000 birds

[Freston Youseff]

with 7,000 stones. In all seriousness, this number is probably tiny compared to the amount of birds that get shredded in personal, commercial and miliatary aircraft over the last 20 years. It's sort reporting the fact that blueberries are blue.

Altamont windfarm photo

[GoneGaryT]

...from a kite (no, not a bird).

It's a bit Pythonesque, really. "The residents pass along here, through the rotating knives..."

damn!

[exhilaration]

And a study at a single Florida coal-fired power plant with four smokestacks recorded an estimated 3,000 deaths in a single evening during a fall migration - "Bird Casualties at a Central Florida Power Plant," Maehr, D. S., et al., Florida Field Naturalist, 11:45-49, 1983. Florida Ornithological Society.

From the link above...

Re:This is old and misleading news

[adamfranco]

Another bit from that article:

In the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area (which has some 7,000 wind
turbines), a two-year study found 182 dead birds, of which 119 were
raptors. The study attributed 55 percent of raptor deaths to collisions
with turbines, eight percent to electrocutions from power lines, 11
percent to collisions with wires, and 26 percent to unknown causes [4].

The inital posted article says:

an estimated 22,000 birds have died... ...after flying into the spinning blades of the wind turbines.

Where was the posted article getting its data? 52 deaths per year by collision is A LOT less than the 1100 per year mentioned in the article. Kinda shifts things a bit...

HOUSTON speaks?

[MrChuck]

Houston, the center of oil and oil energy, has a paper decrying the dangers of WIND enery? To the environment?

I laugh.

But first, more useful stats are gleaned not from "in 20 years of operations" but in "birds per year." Is it static or have lots of work in the last few years to reduce bird death paid off? Using a broad statistic like that reeks of lazy journalism or trying to push aside that bird deaths/year have plunged since Altamont first opened.

I'm not far from the wind farm right now (just over a rise I can see), and I know that lots of birds got whacked with the original windmills.

I also know that new windmills were put in, along with other measures, to DEAL with this problem.

I've heard (on radio, in paper) that the number of birds/year killed is down VASTLY.

Ok, that out of the way: Damage to wild life isincluding hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors - but I imagine that the VAST MAJORITY of bird deaths are to sparrows and other common birds. How much damage is done compared to if they were pumping oil from those fields? Or if it has a coal power plant there?

I find it a little disigenuous that it comes from Houston; from the home of the Resident of the US; on the same day the radio covers stories of Wyoming's [home of Big Dick Cheney] massive budget SURPLUS.

Did you know that a fair amount of energy is required to MAKE solar panels? Ban them!

The best way to save animals and such is to:
Reduce energy use (do you NEED an electric razor when a manual one works fine? Toothbrush? Does that tivo REALLY need to be on 24/7 with disks spinning?
Have you noticed that plasma screens just SUCK power?

It's not like the environmentalists don't have other things they could do. Every MW not needed is a win for the environment.

Generate power locally. And make is EASY for Joe Sixpack to join in.

If every new electrical meter put it were REQUIRED to run both directions, then it would be a simple matter to run 2, 4 solar panels and just push it back on the grid.
If every new house was REQUIRED to have at least the infrastructure for roof panels - a PVC from roof to power area to run cables, perhaps footings for mounting panels - cost < $100 when putting up a roof and hundreds or thousands when putting onto an existing roof.

If they ALSO measured accoring to TIME of use (peak/non-peak), we might have a slight cash motivation to do power consumptive things during the off peak. Right now the only motivation is the somewhat lame: "because it's good". Most people will respond better, I'm sorry to say, to "because it's good and you'll save 20%/month"

If every new WATER meter in Calif were required to measure usage based on TIME, then people might be a bit motivated to run dishs and laundry at night.

So, now that computers are about as fast as they need for the software we're currently running, where are the "new P4/1.2GHz that uses 50% the power of the same machine using der biggen chip?"

I know my LCD's suck a lot less power than CRTs, that my ARM computer uses a gazillionth the power of the dual 1GHz 1U. AT this point, with intel pushing 4GHz, I'd be more attracted to a machine advertised as saving me 20%/month on my power bills. (and yes, I mostly use a 266MHz laptop or a 400MHz apple laptop).

Encourage less power use and you support the country and reduce our need to support nations breeding terrorists.

The Birds Learn

[HardCase]

When I moved into my new house about six years ago, we suffered from fairly frequent blackouts, something like one a week, which seemed pretty excessive to me. So I called the power company to find out what was going on. The engineer I talked to said that the problem was that flocks of birds were running into the new power lines in the area and arcing across the terminals of the transformers. He said that this happened all the time when new above ground structures like this were constructed, but within a year, the birds would have adjusted to the structures and the problem would go away. He also said that the problems would probably shift further south of where I lived, where more housing development was going on.

Sure enough, the next summer, no bird-caused blackouts, but my friend who bought a new house about ten miles south of me was having the very same problems that I'd had!

Anyway, I think that it would be interesting to observe the trend, over time, of the rate of bird deaths. It wouldn't surprise me to see that they fall off rapidly after the first year as the birds become accustomed to the presence of the wind turbines. And, as many have pointed out, 22,000 bird deaths by 7,000 turbines over 20 years is quite a low rate. Everything comes with a cost.

-h-

Bigger killer of birds

[jridley]

Lights left on at night in high rise buildings. Kills birds in the hundreds of thousands every year.

In addition, light pollution from coastal cities screws up nesting and migration patterns for all manner of birds and sea life.

And, has anyone done a study how many birds are killed by pollution from coal plants? It's not so easy, since they don't fall in a nice pile next to the plant.

Nuclear Power is dirt cheap

[dfenstrate]

I work at a Nuclear Power plant, and the process is very money-efficient.
For starters, the energy release by a fission event, per atom involved, is at least 2 million times greater than a chemical reaction- ie, burning.

Now, in the core at my plant, we have 193 fuel assemblies, each of which contains a little more than half a ton of uranium. Skipping over some details, we can basically use this hundred tons of fuel to generate 1.2 GW for 4.5 years.

The coal powerplant down the road 10 miles burns something on the order of 500 tons of coal a day to make half the electricity we do.

Each of our fuel assemblies costs us $750,000. For coal to be as cheap as nuclear, coal would have to go for $0.46 per ton. It actually costs more in the neighborhood of $28.00 per ton.

So even with the added burdens of security and (ridiculous) regulation, nuclear power is still cheaper. My plant is actually a base load plant- we run at 100% capacity 24/7, and other plants (coal, oil, gas, etc) vary their load with demand- because we underbid all of them in the local deregulated market.

If it wasn't for the ornerous regulation, idiot groups like greenpeace, and widespread misunderstanding about nuclear power, you'd see Nuke plants being built on quite a regular basis.
THey'd never be the entire source of electricity for the country, because nuclear plants don't change load gracefully over the course of the day. You start them, fully load them, and run them till they need to be refueled, or shit needs service sooner than you expect, because it's not in it's design parameters.