The Wind Energy Industry Is Still Bedeviled with Danger to Birds and Bats
A friend in the wind industry sent me this interesting article on wind turbines, blades, birds, and subsidies.
I know the industry is taking the situation with birds and bats very seriously, and that’s good; they certainly need to do that. But when I speak on the subject, I quote the usual statistics that we’ve all seen: birds are 600 times more likely to killed by cars, 1100 times more likely to fly into plate glass windows, and several thousands of times more likely to be killed by house cats than they are to die by flying into wind turbines. Of course, this is less true (or maybe completely untrue) of larger birds.
I go on to note that, apparently, the people so frantic about the birds dying from wind turbine “strike” haven’t concerned themselves with determining the impact of fossil fuels on the bird population. 13,200 people died last year, and hundreds of thousands of others became ill, in the U.S. alone, from breathing the aromatics of coal plants. Is it possible that these lethal effects on humankind are benign to birds?
Then, ask further: What about climate change and the consequent reduction of food sources in certain regions of the globe? What about ocean acidification, and the demise of the plankton (and the rest of the food chain) as the oceans warm? What about all the other ways in which we’re losing biodiversity due to our poisoning of our waterways and atmosphere with the combustion of fossil fuels?
The most notrious windfarm for bird kills is the Altamont wind farm. It is claimed that the windfarm stands between the San Franciso bay and what is considered to be their prime huntung grounds. I have however read a bunch of articles over the years that brings out the point that the birds prime hunting ground used to be in the Pleasanton and Livermoore areas until human development forced them to fly further inland and through the windfarm. Even though when the windfarm began it was running smaller faster turning turbines which are being replaced with the larger slower turning units, I think it’s not totally fair to lay all the blame on the turbines if man has altered their natural environment so much that they must now fly through the farm to reach good hunting ground. In trying to do some research to back up my claims I did find articles that stated that bird kills at the farm have dropped 50% from an annual total of 1245 in 2005 to 625 in 2010. I would argue that this is better progress than the fossil fuel industry has made or buildings or windows or cars or cats for that matter. The Exxon Valdez incident alone killed more birds in a single event than all of the windfarms in the country will kill in 100 years. Generally windturbines are the 18th thing down on the list of things that kill birds. I argue that once the other 17 things stop killing birds I will start worrying about windturbines. It seems the windturbine industry is doing as much as it can to minimize it’s impact on birds,
Since we are on the subject, the wind is kicking up here and that means my small fast turning windturbine will be spinning and generating power. I have yet to find a single dead bird under my turbine.