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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?
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).
Iraq: war to save the U
Ya know, at one point I might have cared, but we need to end our reliance on petroleum Real Soon Now(TM), mostly for environmental consequences far greater than 22,000 birds over 20 years, not to mention the socio-political impact of foreign oil dependance.
...fuck the birds.
Anything we can do to remove ourselves from our current situation is beneficial, so with that I say...
I remember seeing something about it's location being in a migratory flight path and other wind projects did not have the same problem.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Evolution in action. Obviously it only kills the dumb birds, the *smart* birds fly *around* the propellors...
I wish we could take this tact with the human population. I say, take the warning labels off of everything and let the chips fall where they may.
It takes toxic products to create a solar energy collector -> it kills too.
Iraq: war to save the U
If the turbines killed three people a day... ...well, we'd probably accept that, too, just as we do for cars.
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The Altamont story about wind farms killing birds is old news. While true, the story is misleading because the vast majority of wind farms are in very different settings with a much lower thread toi birds. A much more reasoned analysis can be found here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pardo/birds/archive/archive 2/msg00468.html
UV Radiation no doubt, or not.
Just imagine a microwave installation receiving power from space, flapping birds would enter one side, and a KFC would set up shop on the other (yes, I know such frying would require a high intensity area).
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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.
Hunters. Get hunters to stand below the turbines and SHOOT the birds before they can be chopped to pieces.
Oh wait, we're saving the BIRDS not the TURBINES.. damn damn damn!
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
"Researched by Wyoming-based Western EcoSystems Technology, the report contends that many more birds are killed annually in collisions with vehicles (60 million), window panes (98 million) and communication towers (4 million) than die nationwide in wind turbines (10,000 to 40,000).
Even the common household cat, wind power industry advocates argue, is responsible for more bird deaths than turbines"
heh, a little persective, there.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
7000 wind turbines kill 22,000 birds in 20 years? That means that a wind turbine will kill a bird (that's "1") every 7 years or so.
To put that in perspective... I have a greenhouse (glass enclosed room) on my home. On average, one or two birds fly into it and kill themselves each year. So my greenhouse is 7-14 times as deadly to birds as a wind turbine.
This is just Darwinian selection at work. By the way, the dead birds get eaten by other birds and animals, so some number of them survive from the free meal. I think they forgot to count those.
Worthless article.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Not to mention the fact that hundreds of millions of birds are killed each year through collisions with glass windows, vehicles, guy wires, and so forth.
But don't take my word for it, check out this article which goes over the statistics, with references. Or, Google for yourself.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
It's a bit Pythonesque, really. "The residents pass along here, through the rotating knives..."
Just encase the fans in glass.
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
There isn't a whole lot, but here's some extra information (refs available on request):
Osborn et al. 2000
Minnesota, estimate 36 +/- 12 birds per year, less than one per turbine
Osborn et al. 1998 (same site):
Observed flight patterns, found that most bird flew above or below the turbine level
Johnson et al. 2002 (same site):
"We assessed effects of the wind farm on birds from 1996 to 1999, with 55 documented collision fatalities. Recovered carcasses included 42 passerines, 5 waterbirds, 3 ducks, 3 upland game birds, 1 raptor, and 1 shorebird."
De Lucas et al. 2004:
Straits of Gibralter, most birds altered flight path to avoid turbines
Several of these researchers seem to think that turbines do kill birds, but in very small numbers compared to other structural sources of mortality. (birds hit stuff, especially plate glass windows)
The problem is that it's easy to count dead birds at the base of turbines, but hard to count birds that died from most other sources of power...
I prefer to be called Evil Scientist.
I live in San Jose, very close to altimont pass. I don't watch birds as a hobby, but when I do watch them it's because of my facination with flight.
As sorry as it sounds (22k birds dead) it's plain old Darwinism. Adapt or die basically.
Next time you're near an overpass populated with pigeons, take the time to watch them, and I mean REALLY watch them. I've noticed a behavior these birds have on freeway's I call "Car Surfing"
Lately i've noticed that the pigeons on the highway 17 camden av overpass won't leave thier roost until there are cars passing underneath. I'm guessing the cars going 60mph below them must produce some sort of small air wave, because the birds never seem to smash into them. They swoop down, grab that little updraft of wind from the car below, and get launched another 30-40 feet into the air.
These birds have adapated to having 1ton+ metal boxes moving around their flight path. Not only have they adapted, but they've learned to use it to their advantage.
As far as altimont pass is concerned, i'm sure the ratio of Kestral/Eagles to common birds is pretty low. I would bet the majority of the birds dying are blackbirds or doves. Carnivoires are oppertunistic, living or dead if it's meat they're going to go for it. So i'm sure most of these accidents with the exotic preditors have nothing to do with the windmills, and much to do with the altimont pass groundskeepers not cleaning up the dead carrion. Perhaps if they made it a part of their daily job to toss all the dead birds in the back of their pickup and move them to a safer place for the preditorial birds to eat, we would see less deaths.
Until that happens though, what we will see is a fine example of these birds adapting to their enviroment. The stupid ones will be weeded out of the genepool.
Get treehuggers to stand in front of the turbines and catch the birds before they hit the blades.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
From the link above...
I don't care if the hippies die or not. I just hope they don't kill us all with them.
Quoth the original poster:
> > 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?
Our article poster is missing an option.
"How many birds would die from the acid rain that a nuclear power plant would produce?" Oh, right. No acid rain comes out of nuke plants.
"OK, so how many birds would die from the radioactivity emitted by a nuclear plant?" Oh, right. The poster was considering coal as an alternative, but a coal plant spews out more radioactive waste in the form of ash than the nuke ever does.
"Umm, OK, [Disclaimer: I don't believe in global warming, but I'll assume the article poster does] so how many birds would die from coastal wetlands being swamped by rising sea levels caused by the global warming caused by the release of CO2 from the nuclear plant?" Oh, right. No CO2 either.
"Look, can we just BANANA? Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything?"
In a word, no. Energy is a means to produce wealth. Wealth is good.
Wind: Nonviable (kills birds, not cost efficient.)
Solar: Nonviable (cost of production exceeds energy consumed, massive chemical waste byproducts)
Coal and gas: Viable (unless you believe in global warming, which most "greens" do)
Hydroelectric: Nonscalable (there are only so many rivers to dam, plus think of the environmental and economic damage associated with damming something like the Mississippi a'la Three Gorges).
Geothermal: Nonscalable (very few areas have harvestable geothermal resources)
Conservation: Nonscalable. Cut your energy consumption by 50%? Sure. But 50% of O(N^x, where x > 1) is still going to present you with unacceptable constraints on growth.
Nuclear: Zero CO2. Zero emissions while running. Waste products are compact and easily-localized/transported substance that may be a useful resource in the future. Most kilowatt-hours per kilogram of fuel (and waste) by orders of magnitude over every other option.
Even if you don't think nuclear is a good option, it's almost certainly left as the Least Sucky Option.
My office has a mirrored window and has provided me with a great opportunity to view and examine a variety of birds (both rare and common) up real close (both dead and stunned). The ground below my window is littered with bird remains. The local feral cat has caught on though.
I say outlaw mirrored window before outlawing wind turbines.
Put the bird carcasses and a big furnace that boils water that spins more turbines! Think OUTSIDE the box people! We just got yet another energy source!
I think this may be a legend. I Germany there was research about bird populations and wind farms. In the 80th it was suspected that it had effects on bird death, that rotors may kill birds. However this assumption was falsified by empirical evidence.
Acid rain is a myth that has been debunked for years.
By who, the Iraqi Information Minister? I used to live in the house my father grew up in, which is downwind from a paper mill. When he was growing up, the rain would literally peel away the paint on my grandparents' house and car over a few months, and the grass and trees were always sickly. In the wake of clean air legislation, I've never had to see acid rain, and my yard was always green. I don't even smell the stink that used to occasionally come from the plant when I was a kid anymore.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That's hardly a victimless energy source. We all know that the Sun is only able to continue emitting energy by consuming a steady stream of kittens.
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.
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-
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.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
On the plus side, we'd have to get Godzilla and Mothra to team up against the scarecrow, so, it wouldn't be a complete loss.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
(and it has a nice picture)
The bird kill in California is often used as a anti-wind argument. (Texans still think of themselves as an oil producing state, despite having a net import of oil for about 10 years now)
In this case it is a flaw in the design of the farm... in Alton pass the turbines sit on gridded towers (like high tension lines). These towers make excellent perches, and a lot of birds hang out in them. Hawks especially have a tendency to dive at prey, and run smack into a turbine blade.(They don't get chopped up, just collide like your living room window.)
Most newer wind farms have far less turbines (its cheaper days to install a single 1MW turbine, than 10 100KW turbines. Also the industry has learned that monopole tower (a single smooth shaft, rather than a lattice) keeps the birds away. (Its cheaper to install too..)
This comment created using 100% renewable electrons via AustinEnergy GreenChoice (mostly wind)
However, between 7000 turbines and 22,000 birds, thats not exactly a bad statistic. More birds are killed by lots of other things, such as aircraft, cars, and yes, even your humble domestic cat.
I can vouch for that. I got two pheasants and a sparrow this year with one Toyota. Multiply 3 by the the number of Toyotas on the road, and one can easily see that wind farms and turbines are not the problem. Save the birds! Ban imported cars!
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.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The poor management of one company does not mean nuclear power is expensive. You are correct in that regulation and security add a great deal of cost, but incorrect that this is a deal breaker.
I work at a nuclear power plant, and we sell electricity in a de-regulated market. We underbid all the other types of plants in the New Hampshire Market, and still make hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit.
We buy our fuel from Westinghouse, and they seem to find it to be a profitable business, because they're still in it. They charge us $750,000 per fuel assembly (193 at a time), and if you read my other post, you'll understand why we pay gladly.
Decomissioning a plant is expensive, true, but represents the profit of one years operation, out of a 40-60 year run for most US plants. The threat of terrorism has undoubtable cost a lot of money in additional security, but since incredibly tight security was the rule long before 9/11, I doubt the increase was even 25% of the security budget. No facts on that, just an educated guess. You'd have to have a team of Navy Seals to get into our plant unnoticed, and even if you did, the worst you could do would be to irreprably damage the plant- not harm the public.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Nuclear power. France and Japan get 70% of their power from nuclear. It's clean and we know how to do it right. Too bad we made it so hard to build a new plant.
I mean its been pointed out that 22k dead in 20 years is pretty low compared to how many die a day of other causes. Wind represents one of the cleaner forms of enegery we have. These people are saying this wind farm should be torn down. What, my question, should we replace it with? I always hear bitching from these groups, yet very few solutions. Personally I think they should shut it down and build a nuclear reactor next to it just to spite the idiots that propagated this report.
The whole NIMBY additude is stupid. We need to do something about adding more power to our grids. Suggest a nuclear plant, there could be a melt down, coal or gas, oh that causes too much acid rain, Wind, those windmills are large, noisy, and are unsightly to look at, solar, it would cost too much, etc. etc.
personally I would like to see the tree-huggers in a giant hampster cage with a wheel they could run on to generate power...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
How about one single well-aimed, fully-fueled passenger liner? No harm to the public then?!?
Probably not, actually. For one, this has recently become an obvious danger, and the airspace around nuclear power plants is monitored closely.
Secondly, the designers of my plant already thought of this, at least to a lesser extent. The containment building was built to withstand the impact of an F-111, fully loaded, at top speed. It's three feet of concrete, with enough rebar to make a six-inch steel shell if it wasn't mixed in with the concrete. And that's just the outer building.
Now, a 737 weighs more than an f-111, but the mass is more spread out, and it goes slower. The building is also rated for at least a three-hour fire, but I wouldn't be suprised if it lasted longer, aside from the fact that 40 fire departments would be there right quick.
Another thing often forgotten here is the human factor- I'm going to make a bold statement, that in light of flight 93, and the new, higher stakes, no US passenger airliner will be successfully hijacked and crashed into a building.
This leaves cargo planes- not sure of the maximum fuel load in a fedex plane, but I'll guess they don't go across the country, and would have less fuel onboard than the 9/11 planes- and foreign planes, who would be nearly dry by the time they hit, and thus less of a fire hazard. Recall that it was the fire, fueled by all that aviation kerosene, that brought down the WTC, not the physical impact.
If a jet impacted into our containment building, the fuel would be disbursed across the outside, and since it wouldn't be able to heat any critical load bearing members (because the entire, massive, overbuilt structure is the load bearer), you'd be safe for quite some time.
Yeah, so anyway, we thought of the plane thing years ago, so think of a soda can filled with gas vs a brick doghouse. Annoying, but not really a threat.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
You're right, in that there's no fundamental design reason that we must be limited to base loading. We do, in fact, have equipment to change load over the course of the day. As a practical matter, though, changing loads frequently, and running at partial loads, has the tendancy to make things break early. This is what I'm told anyway, as I've only been at the plant half a year. I'm guessing that the engineers, in all the marvelous work they did getting the plant together, didn't evaluate all that many power levels for long term operation, or maybe their were just some different effects at different temperatures that were unanticipated. Also, cycling power levels would seem to me to cause more wear than running at the same level all the time, as you've got significant temperature and pressure transients.
Regardless, you're correct about the usage of a huge capital investment.
I do work with a few Navy guys, and navy plants are built quite a bit more robustly that commercial plants. The fastest recovery from a scram one of my coworkers did on his carrier (I think it was the Enterprise) was 12 minutes. The fastest we can do at the power plant is around 8 hours, though if it was a matter of life and death, we may be able to do it quicker.
Although all the physics and fundamentals are the same, in Navy nuke plants, without power, you're dead in the water, vulnerable, and possibly under attack. In commercial plants, you're just not making as much money as you'd like to. So there are some construction diferences.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.