Posted on 08/01/2016 6:08:57 PM PDT by SJackson
The Ivanpah solar plant in Southern California killed 6,185 birds in 2015. That includes burning about 1,145 birds with the intense heat coming off its many mirrored heliostat panels, according to a recent report on the government-backed solar project.
An audit of how many birds and bats Ivanpah kills every year found “there were an estimated 2500 fatalities from known causes and 3686 fatalities from unknown causes” last year. Of the known fatalities, nearly 46 percent were killed by the intense, concentrated heat used to generate electricity.
Western EcoSystems Technology, the firm auditing Ivanpah, estimated about 1,145 dead birds have “charring, curling, or melting of feathers.”
“It’s an unbelievably high number, and we’re really alarmed,” Garry George, renewable energy director for the Audubon Society’s California arm, told E&E News. “We have a lot of questions about this mortality report.”
Ivanpah has been the target of bird enthusiasts for some time. The $2.2 billion solar plant doesn’t just use ordinary photovoltaic panels, it uses more than 170,000 mirrored heliostat panels to concentrate the sun’s rays on to boilers atop three tall towers to generate electricity.
That means the air around Ivanpah is superheated by concentrated solar power — not good news for the thousands of migratory birds that pass over the site every year.
“During the 2014 – 2015 monitoring year, there were an estimated 2500 fatalities based on detections from known causes,” Western EcoSystems Technology’s audit reads. “Of the known fatalities estimates, 45.8% were attributed to singeing and 54.1% to collision.”
Ivanpah’s not only come under fire for barbecuing birds, critics have hammered the federally funded facility for not generating all the power it promised its customers.
California regulators considered shutting down Ivanpah for not generating enough electricity. The plant only generated 45 percent of expected power in 2014 and only 68 percent in 2015, according to government data. It’s electricity also cost $200 per megawatt-hour.
Regulators ended up giving Ivanpah more time to boost its energy production. NRG Energy, the company that operates Ivanpah, said it has delivered Pacific Gas & Electric 97 percent of the electrons it had contracted to buy. NRG said it had largely solved the engineering problems causing Ivanpah to under perform.
But lawmakers are still worried taxpayers could be on the hook if Ivanpah goes under. Ivanpah got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, and even asked for a $539 million grant to pay off its federal loan.
Ivanpah’s bird kill count last year was a 77 percent increase from the year before, but Western EcoSystems Technology warned against comparing the plant’s two years of operations.
Western’s audit said the firm responsible for estimating how many birds Ivanpah killed in its first year had biases in it that were corrected in the second year kill report. Western even ran a reanalysis of both years and found “2086 fatalities from known causes and 3042 fatalities from unknown causes in year 1, and 2143 fatalities from known causes and 3038 fatalities from unknown causes in year 2.”
An NRG spokesman told E&E News no threatened or endangered birds were killed by Ivanpah and stressed the company was doing more to reduce the number of birds being killed.
It can’t be any worse than the thousands of birds killed by windmills every year.
All this green energy crap is just that, a liberal inspired atrocity.
Bump!
Ivanpah...was only conceived with Federal monies...( Your money , my money...)
Ivanpah used dated technology..that's a fact.
The Ivanpah site will be eventually be abandoned...Just like Solyndra...was.
It's just a pay to play game...here and abroad...by our "leaders".
And our "leaders" ain't using their money....
It's a rigged game....They use our tax monies to give away to what they want...either votes...or money. Plain and simple.
It's totally true. Bald Eagles....Our national bird!!
Sounds like chicken.............
Put in a backyard fish pond.
My Koi and Comets wait below the surface for the females to hover and lay their eggs.
*Snap!*
And the larvae are delicacies for them.
Bat houses are effective, too.
That's for the entire United States. Meanwhile the solar panels are in one tiny area of a large State and it fries how many birds?
I rather a bird be killed by a cat than a solar panel. The cat gets exercise and catches a meal. I have also found that more birds (on my property) die during a severe thunderstorm and high winds than killed by my cat.
Good post.............
#BirdLivesMatter..?
This burning bird stuff is all Icarus err ridiculous ....:o)
Libtard asshats. Seriously, they’re Libtard asshats...
What it comes from is that environmentalists aren’t speaking out against “green” energy projects. Some groups have favored eagle-killing windmills as good for the environment!
Or an oil company, though they just pay big fines. Wind farms have killed hundreds of golden eagles. No harm, no foul. Laws don't apply to wind farms.
You'll see estimates from 300,000 to almost a million a year. No one counts them, so who knows.
Too late.
In what way does it not work?
Didn’t this project have to undergo an environmental impact study? Huge developments have been stopped least a single threatened bat, rat, snake infect fish or plant be harmed. Where were the endless lawsuits from environmental groups that have stopped oil refineries, dams and generating plants when these facilities were being proposed? Imagine the reaction to this plant if it were not a darling of the environmentalist whackos. Note the forests of windmills that blight the landscape similarly kill thousands of birds and no environmentalist whackos shed a single tear.
No group I know of favors Ivanpah.
From a 2009 press release by Center For Biological Diversity:
"Simply put, this project is proposed in the wrong place,” said Ileene Anderson, biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “There are tens of thousands of acres of already-disturbed lands in the California desert that are much closer to cities and towns that would make far more sense for this kind of project.”
Reading the article it actually killed over six thousand.
I can't imagine given the problems with Ivanpah that anyone thinks it is a good design anywhere.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.