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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 Nope, think of the children has been replaced by "think of the birds".
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.
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.
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
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.
The big advantage heat-conversion plants have is that you can heat slow cooling material such as salt which can continue production electricity long after the sun has set, effectively turning it into a electricity storage medium. The big problem large scale use of Photovoltaic has, is that we do not have a cheap and scalable way to store generated electricity for use when needed, not just when the sun is shining.
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.
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.
Except you can not exceed the solar power that hits the surface of the planet from the sun.
There are actual, serious, plans to put solar in orbit. Solar isn't limited to the surface of the planet.
But let's ignore that power-in-sky thinking for a moment.
The amount of sunlight that hits the Earth is an astronomical 150,000,000,000,000,000 Watts.
That's around 1000 times man's total energy usage.
To put it in per capita terms;
At noon, 1 square meter on the surface receives about 1 kilowatt of energy.
The average over a day is 4 kilowatt hours per square meter.
A typical home is 100 square meters, and uses 24 kilowatt hours a day.
At 12% efficiency, you only need to cover half the roof with photovoltaics to supply 100% of that homes electric needs.
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.