"Hey Pickens. Leave those bats alone!"
Posted on 08/27/2008 4:52:32 AM PDT by chessplayer
Wind Turbines Give Bats the “Bends,” Study Finds
"Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests. Scientists aren’t sure why, but bats are attracted to the turbines, which often stand 300 feet (90 meters) high and sport 200-foot (60-meter) blades."
"The mammals’ curiosity can result in lethal blows by the rotors, which spin at a rate of about 160 miles (260 kilometers) per hour."
"But scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine bases showed any physical evidence of being hit by a blade."
"A surprising 90 percent showed signs of internal hemorrhaging—evidence of a drop in air pressure near the blades that causes fatal damage to the bats’ lungs."
(Excerpt) Read more at wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com ...
build more belfries.
SAVE THE BATS.
Drill Here, Drill NOW!!!
Belfrys, you poltroon.
Adaptation will take care of this problem. Those bats that don’t die of the bends will be the ones that reproduce. Problem solved.
"Hey Pickens. Leave those bats alone!"
But I don't WANT to adopt a bat.
If windmills endanger bats, will Pelosi be affected?
Interesting development ping!
I doubt this will slow down production. We recently made a trip to New Mexico. These things are everywhere by the thousands and more are being built every day.
“Belfrys, you poltroon.”
Ah contraire...the rule is: If the final y is preceded by a vowel, one adds an s to form the plural, as in tray/trays. If the final y is preceded by a consonant, one changes the y to i and adds -es, as in belfry/belfies.
Her investment in Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (T. Boone Pickins) might be.
Pickens should give each bat a tiny diving bell.
“belfry/belfies”
how about belfries?
Some really funny posts here.Most enjoyable.
Becky Quick will, breathlessly, interview T Boone regarding his feelings on the impending doom. T Boone will comment that natural gas is the only way to solve the crisis. Then T Boone will say drill, drill, drill. Then T Boone will say wind turbine will save us from the evil Saudis. Then T Boone will say a combination of natural gas and wind should solve the problem, Then T Boone will say the bats will survive buy using clean natural gas backed up by wind...
GO PHILLIES!!!!!!!!!
160 MPH ???? Maybe in a hurricane ...
Not so fast, my politically incorrect FRiends!! We protect speckled owls, various bugs, rodents, fish, etc., all in the name of protecting endangered species. It’s just a matter of time before the envirowackos step out of the shadows to add wind energy to the list of deadly energy-producing technologies that are dangerous to wildlife.
It’s coming.
However, I believe that T-Bone now, seeing people like Al (Gorebal Warming) Gore and the tree-huggers, are on to something.
To hell with the dead birds. Cover the countryside with giant windmills that produce small amounts of power, and get T-Bone into Shadyside Rest Home with the other oldsters that are drifting into senility.
T Boone has rapidly risen on my personal “please go the !(@*# away” list.
The spin faster than the wind speed. The arc on those things is huge. Assuming a 30-40 mph wind, 160 mph tip speed seems very likely.
These people are the purveyors of the worst kind of junk science. I live near some windmills and the Sierra Club sponsored sctivists came in and did a bat study. They said that the the windmills were decimating the bat population. They did a study of 1 windmill, examined the area for bat carcasses and published their conclusions. These conclusions were preconceived and the data massaged to make it come out the way that they wanted. For instance, out of the hundreds of windmills, they chose one nearest to a very active bat colony. It was right beside it actually. Then they extrapolated the number of dead bats times the number of windmills in the range. Instead of talking about the couple dozen dead bats around the one windmill, they talked about the thousands of bats that they “assumed” that all of the windmills killed. They also didn’t determine that the bats were actually killed by the windmills. They merely found the carcasses and “assumed” that the bats were killed by the windmill. Apparently they believe that bats live forever and the only thing that kills bats is windmills! Next, the area that they searched around the windmill seemed suspicious. They searched a 2.5 mile radius around the windmill for the dead bats. I guess those windmill blades can toss a bat a long ways. That works out to be a little under 20 square miles. So every dead bat that they found withing 20 square miles of the bat colony was “assumed” to be killed by the windmill. This is how the scientist activists described their study to the local newspaper. They saw it as an important scientific finding. They said that the windmill range killed over 4,000 common bats.
All of this is assuming that the Sierra Club sponsored activist scientists didn’t “fudge” any of the results.
As much as I respect T. Boone over the years, I think he over-reached on this Pickens Plan.... mainly because he is pandering to the lib-Democrat wack-a-doodle anti-drillers.
He implies that the US must get off "foreign oil" or face certain destruction.
Firstly, that will never happen. We will need energy from Canada and to a lesser extent, Mexico, for the forseeable future.
Secondly, it is not that destructive to America if we buy oil/natural gas/shale, LNG from Canada or Norway, or Sweeden.
T. Boone should come up with a figure of how much we buy from those countries that seek our destruction, like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other terror supporting countries.
THAT's what we should target... not the friendly countries.
“Adaptation will take care of this problem. Those bats that don’t die of the bends will be the ones that reproduce. Problem solved.”
So if a human survives the bends, it`s children will be immune to them?
What about nucular?
;^)
He’s also into H20. Pickens Plan. This is the lipstick he is putting on the pig that is his plan to sell huge quantities of water from the Ogallala aquifer. The wind farm provides the warm and cozy cover for his need to build a water pipeline (which will follow the power lines from the wind farms) to Dallas.
Pickens sends landowners letters
Energy tycoon plans to build water/electricity pipeline through North Texas Landowners along the proposed route got notification that Pickens’ company is interested in buying right-of-way from them — or seizing it through the law of eminent domain.
http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2008/apr/30/pickens-sends-landowners-letters/
“Bats have long life-spans—up to 30 years. But they don’t reproduce annually and when they do their litter is usually only one to two pups, making them vulnerable to large population drops.”
“Slow reproductive rates can limit a population’s ability to recover from crashes and thereby increase the risk of endangerment or extinction,” Robert Barclay from the University of Calgary said.
“Bats play a vital role in the ecosystem by preying on insects, including insects that are common in agricultural fields. Their loss could mean a dramatic upswing in insect infestations.”
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0825-hance_bats.html
Another example of the law of unintended consequences.
Ah contraire...the rule is: If the final y is preceded by a vowel, one adds an s to form the plural, as in tray/trays. If the final y is preceded by a consonant, one changes the y to i and adds -es, as in belfry/belfies
how about belfries?
I think we have all learned something here today about pluralization, spelling and typos.
Which does mean, --it!!
The large wind generators turn two slowly to do this.
Assuming 100 ft blade diameter (is that in the correct size range?), a 160 mph tip speed occurs at about 45 rpm rotational speed.
Twice that if the blade diamter is 50 ft.
Seems pretty feasible to me.
Quite frankly, I wish T. Boone Pickens would shut up.
His first commercial gave credence to the Dems talking point “We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.” Wrong, Boone. Drill here, drill now.
Now we see Bela Pelosi has “invested “ in his energy company, which will profit handsomely from what—government subsidies and taxpayer financed power transmission lines.Otherwise, no one would build his projects—not profitable.
His second commercial uses Pelosi’s talking point “ We use 25% of the world’s oil, but we have only 3% of the world’s oil reserves” Hey, Boone—this is like comparing apples to oranges! They are not the same number—if they were—we’d all be walking now, wouldn’t we?
He’s right about using natural gas, but gee—we have to DRILL for that, now don’t we, Boone?
Boone is the Warren Buffett of energy. Rich, loud, and profiting off the taxpayer while telling us what we should do.
Hmmm..... A quick web search on their quoted scientist Erin Baerwald shows an obsession with bats:
http://www.daylife.com/words/Erin_Baerwald
However this August 26, 2008 article describes her as University of Calgary graduate student Erin Baerwald:
http://www.mytelus.com/ncp_news/article.en.do?pn=tech&articleID=2982192
Personally, I don’t look to activist grad students for real science.
Go Pokes!!
The study was initiated by TransAlta after the company’s wind farm operators noticed bat carcasses below the turbines and approached Barclay, an internationally-recognized bat expert, for advice, said Jason Edworthy, Director, Stakeholder Relations for TransAlta.
The paper “Barotrauma is a significant cause of bat fatalities at wind turbines” by Erin F. Baerwald, Genevieve H. D’Amours, Brandon J. Klug and Robert M.R. Barclay will be available online at: www.current-biology.com
Robert M. R. Barclay is a professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary in Alberta. He has been studying the ecology and behavior of bats for over twenty years.
R. Mark Brigham, an associate professor in the Biology Department at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, studies the ecology of bats and nocturnal insectivorous birds.
Try to grab a blade tip with your hand.
There comes a time when old guys like, T Boone, Ross Perot, and Warren Buffett, should spend their time down on the farm. T Boone got slapped by someone recently about his P-Plan stating drilling will not solve the problem. Now, drill, drill, drill. The conversation must have been interesting.
I did not know this. The things I learn reading FR...
Would it be too much to ask that democrats be included on that list?
What, wind turbins or bats
The answer is easy. Basically it’s to put a bat whistle on the end of each turbine. Just like dog whistles can only be heard by dogs, a sonar generating whistle would only be heard by bats. Cars have been driving around for years with whistles to scare off deer.
Oh. Just so long as it doesn’t slow down the production of bts — they’re such cute lil critters, donchathink?
That would be the speed at the tip of the blade.
For large wind turbines that have a 200-400 foot arc, even at low RPMs, those blade tips are traveling very fast.
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