What a crock of crap ... I am looking at some of those windmills on Altamont as I type this post. My friend owns a ranch right next to the windmills and there are NO bird bodies near them. The bird bodies can be found on Hiway 580 and Vasco Road which both run through the windmill farm.
1. Any birds killed in the area are being killed by the cars and trucks on the road ... should we ban them.
2. The windmill blades rotate very slowly. In high wind even the small faster moving blades take a full second to complete just one rotation ... the bigger ones take over two seconds. Any bird slow enough or dumb enough to be hit by the blades would have been picked off LONG AGO by the MANY hawks in the area.
3. The blades are NOT moving fast enough to hurt much less kill the birds even if they did hit the blade even in a wind storm. Many many more birds fly into windows than into these windmills (should we ban windows) ... BTW the generators are governed so that they can only spin so fast no matter how much wind there is.
Bottomline ... the environmentalists are again (as usual ... totally full of $hit.
The thing about the blade speed is that the tip speed is about 200 mph. From way back they seem slow but if you are a bird, with a tiny little brain, you will make mistakes. Kinda like humans and cars.
There are solutions though. Larger windmills on taller towers that are tubular and not lattice helps quite a bit.