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..."

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.