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Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead
Elledan writes: Federal investigators in California have requested that BrightSource — owner of thermal solar plants — halt the construction of more (and bigger) plants until their impact on wildlife has been further investigated. "Unlike many other solar plants, the Ivanpah plant does not generate energy using photovoltaic solar panels. Instead, it has more than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door. Together, they cover 1,416 hectares. Each mirror collects and reflects solar rays, focusing and concentrating solar energy from their entire surfaces upward onto three boiler towers, each looming up to 40 stories high. The solar energy heats the water inside the towers to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes." The concentrated solar energy chars and incinerates the feathers of passing birds. BrightSource estimates about a thousand bird die this way every year, but an environmental group claims the real number is much higher.
Number of birds killed by oil spills?
Number of birds killed by air pollution?
Thanks California. Human impact of using coal fired plants? Nope, think of the children has been replaced by "think of the birds".
No seriously, I'd love to see a video of this.
Very interesting problem, wonder how it can be solved?
Be seeing you...
Mortality rate of fish through the turbine is close to 10%
Except fish are slimy, scaly and make weird mouth shapes when you pull them out of the water to look at them. They look pretty awkward.
Birds on the other hand, are beautiful creatures flying through the air, truly, beautiful, feathered friends, God's own creations.
But if 3 birds die in a 3500 acre site per day, heaven help us all for destroying nature. I can go out in my back yard and shake the six to eight trees on my half-acre and watch at least four birds fly out.
moox. for a new generation.
Why not skip all the expensive equipment and just use birds for fuel?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Crunching the numbers, it's foolish to delay solar power adoption for even 28K birds a year.
Climate change is expected to soon kill off 1/8th of all bird species.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
200M birds die from cats each year in Canada ( which has the human population of California).
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
Either stop climate change pollution, or kiss some birds goodbye (peck on the cheek).
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Probably doesn't taste like chicken though as chickens can't fly.
Like sheep, they don't fly so much as plummet.
(Actually, chickens can sort of fake it enough to get out of uncovered pens on occasion)
#DeleteChrome
Looked into, but not freaked out about. Cats kill hundreds of millions of birds each year. 200M die in Canada alone.
200,000,000
vs.
28,000?
It's not even close. Delaying a switch to solar is much more deadly for birds, as it's expected 1/8th of species will soon (within decades) become extinct due to climate change.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This has been going on for months and months. I wondered how long it would take Slashdot to finally surface it.
This is Brightsource in Mohave. Feinstein et. al. held it up for years to protect turtles that were supposedly endangered.
Now it's frying birds. Certain species could be wiped out because they happen to inhabit the area.
This is the no. 1 best contemporary example of exactly why renewables will never displace more than a trivially small fraction of electric supply in the Western world; land use and its effects on ecology. Every form of wind or solar consume vast amounts of land, permanently altering the ecology of the region. Whether it's the "wind farm [that] imperils rare grass" (no, really — rare grass) or desert birds igniting in mid-air, the same greens that demand renewables will insure its failure.
Windandsolar is a pipe dream.
Hey, mdsolar ... you there man? Why you want to kill all the birds man? Quick! Go find a scary Fukushima leak story and post it!
Go ahead, pick "troll" or whatever. I have karma for the ages.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Every kind of energy generation has a price. It's the price of civilization. Only in California could this come as a surprise...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
...set up some streaming cameras. I'm sure the nerds on the Internet will write something to count them.
Or are they afraid the videos will go viral. WATCH BIRDS GET ROASTED OMG WTF LOL!!!!
California has had 2-3 of these running for decades. Yes, newer ones are bigger, but even the smaller ones like the one in Coalinga can fry a bird if it flies near the focal point.
Maybe just stop building these. They are quite expensive. They are the most expensive source of electricity, bar none.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... (sort by levelised cost).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Open a new Kentucky Fried Bird! Offers only the finest organic, free-range birds, with no added hormones or antibiotics and fed only their natural diet. Guaranteed to be extra-crispy!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I'll buy your number for cats - there are hundreds of millions of them, and they love to hunt birds. A power plant that kills a few thousand is completely irrelevant in comparison, but these are clueless "progressive" types, they aren't expected to understand basic math.
I'll pass on the latest climate change panic...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
There was a paper in the 80s about research done on Solar One - the first of these type of plants - I can't locate it right now.
From memory, it found most birds were killed by collision with the mirrors and only a few were killed by the concentrated radiation.
Glazed windows kill birds in the same way that mirrors do.
Most glazed windows are in areas of high bird populations. Birds and people like similar environments. Deserts where these plants are located have much lower bird populations and much rarer birds. Raw numbers are meaningless. It is proportion of population that matters.
Solar to heat to mechanical to electricity as already reached its maximum efficiency.
Photovoltaic has still many recent discoveries for great efficiency improvements, and more are likely to come.
Using heat for conversion is degrading the energy to its worst and less usable form, direct conversion is the way to go. Halting those heat projects is good news.
Reminds me of the "peace dove" scene in "Mars Attacks!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Chickens can definitely fly. I've seen them fly on many occasions. Sure they're nowhere near as good as a seagull or an unladen swallow, they can get off the ground and fly short distances. This is why chickens are either kept indoors or have their wings clipped (and now you know where the expression comes from), as otherwise they'd fly out of their pen.
At least then the Greens will be happy for a change.
Actually no, Society is not OK with that. Only the most horrible pet owners let their cats out like that. It's the scumbag fringe of society that is OK with it.
Many cities are trying hard to fight the scourge of bad pet owners letting their cats out.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1. Solar Thermal plants are built in the desert because that's where they have the most ideal operating conditions. The fact that there are more birds in forests than deserts is completely irrelevant because they don't build concentrating solar plants in forests.
2. We would expect the casualties to scale roughly with the number of plants, so is you had 1,000 such plants, that would be 1,000x the casualties. Still a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of birds killed by feral cats every year in North America.
3. You are right, of course, however you have to consider a cost-benefit as well. The cost of preventing bird deaths from not building concentrating solar plants (both monetarily and environmentally) versus, say, the cost of preventing bird deaths by doing something about the cat population. If saving the birds is the priority, then perhaps your dollar would be better spent on programs to reduce feral cat populations than preventing solar thermal plants from being built.
=Smidge=
Seriously. People need to stop thinking of renewable energy sources as completely clean and utterly harmless.
They aren't. And never have been.
Once the lies and misconceptions are cleared away, THEN people can start making intelligent choices about the risks they want to take building out their power systems.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I don't have figures for birds specifically handy, but I can tell you the best and worst for wildlife generally. Ignoring minor things like tidal power, the two best are geothermal and nuclear. It's too bad that geothermal is limited to certain geological areas, because it's pretty good on all measures. It releases some greenhouse gases and often requires fracking, but it's pretty safe for wildlife and generally a good idea. Nuclear is quite clean, except of course on the two instances of a major accident.
The worst for wildlife are coal and hydroelectric dams. Hydro surprises some people, but in the best case a dam starts outby destroying a large swath of habitat, then permanently disrupts fish migration and the ecosystems dependant on the waterway. In the worst case, Banqiao. The Banqiao hydroelectric dam disaster was far, far worse than any nuclear accident ever has been.
Ps, International Rivers is a good place to start if you want to know more about the environmental damage done by dams, particularly large dams as used for hydroelectric power. They are advocates of course ; just as the ASPCA isn't objective about animals, International Rivers isn't objective about rivers. They advocate for what they believe is right, but each is a good source of information about their side of the side of the issue.
Cats killing birds is not an issue. Those little ground finches? The sparrows? They're prolific. They climb into other birds's nests and destroy eggs. They kill small birds. They're vicious, hateful little bastards, and they're extincting the native species of the United States.
95% of birds I see are sparrows now. They're ground-foraging. We need more cats.
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Chernobyl IS an operating plant. But the "operating" part is not what affected local animal life.
But what mdsolar and his type forget is, Chernobyle is 1 incident. Fukushima 2. Over the life of all the nuclear plants, even taking those 2 horrible accidents (preventable they may have been) the track record world wide for Nuclear energy is better than most other types of energy.
Considering the number of birds killed every day from common human activity such as driving cars, flying planes, discarding certain trash, its hard to think a few birds killed by windmills or a concentrated solar power (CSP) should be a concern. Not that they shouldn't take practical steps to minimize it. CSP is a neat technology, but far behind Solar PV and wind in being ready for practical applications, so it will likely remain a quite small part of the energy mix if/when it gets out of the pilot phase. CSP development is however, a really interesting to follow. It involves a range of challenges that cross engineering and material science disciplines that aren't obvious when you think "its just generating steam with mirrors". But, in reality, it is really hard to obtain the steady heat input and control needed to obtain steady, quality steam. There are numerous trade-offs between heat absorbing coatings, their adhesive techniques and their ability to expand and contract frequently. There is a challenge in designing the right turbine which operates efficiently as possible over a wide operating curve. Central "boiler" tank type designs have very slow heating / cooling times, which helps dampen solar variances, but make it difficult to place turbine cycle equipment nearby in a way that doesn't impact the heating approach. The linear Fresnel mirror/tube type CSP plants on the other hand have big problems in maintaining even heating throughout the long tubes which leads to hammer and damage, and a lot of expansion/contraction related issues. I'd love to work on one of these projects, its worth reading about if that kind of thing gives you a rise.
Sadly, Suncor tried to use the same arguments when 230 ducks died after landing in an Alberta Oilsands Tailings pond that had equipment in place to scare off birds. Too bad for them that the argument is only permitted for environmental shill approved methods of energy production. **Likely to be modded down because truth hurts and makes illogical people lash out.
I suspect oil/coal shills here.
I thought the same thing but a brief skim of their donor list indicates otherwise, an easy to find annual report is also not something commonly available for the myriad of FF front groups.
Having said that, the last line of the summary is oddly misleading, the phrase "but an environmental group claims" should read "but federal wildlife officers claim". It was the Feds who observed "a streamer every 2min", which by simple linear extrapolation is ~25k/yr, they became alarmed and requested the construction halt. Notice they have not called for a halt to operations. I think a closer look is certainly warranted and Federal Wildlife people would appear to be the appropriate group to be doing the looking. Where the environmental group actually fit into the story I'm not sure, if they were the ones who called in the feds, then good on 'em for not turning a blind eye to a politically inconvenient truth.
Disclaimer: Self confessed "greenie" long before greenpeace and science parted ways in the 80's.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Just brush 'em with barbecue sauce and slap 'em on a bun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Actually, to be more precise, the Mother Jones bird kill article fails on almost all fronts of science.
1) starts with the presumption that all changes in bird population are due to Fukushima accident, but makes zero attempts to justify that logic, its basis, or evidence to support that theory.
2) ignores completely the habitat impact of the tsunami
3) ignores completely the impact of human evacuation. No bird feeders, no bird baths, no trash (common food source), no fish cleaning, etc.
4) states that it was breeding season when the tsunami and accident occurred, but completely ignores that aspect of tsunami impact.
5) does not cite any control study in any other coastal areas of Japan
6) does not cite any existing base science that would support a radiological aspect as being a cause.
The article also leaps to the conclusion that there are only two possible scenarios that could apply;
1) The Fukushima birds have never experienced radiation of this intensity before and may therefore be especially sensitive to radioactive contaminants.
2) Overall more birds declined at Chernobyl because it's been more than two decades since that disaster, during which many species have basically disappeared from the most contaminated regions.
That is what get's pushed as science by the agenda driven, and accepted by the ignorant. To be fair, this is just an ignorant article that tries to interpret other's work, speaking to an audience that is willing to accept it. Official details of an actual sanctioned study would likely be more useful.