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.
Generation is costing $200 / MWH. Residential Californians pay $177.40 / MWH. And the article doesn’t even give you enough information to figure out whether the high $200 figure is before, or after subsidies.
I guess this is just another government endeavor where they can make up the difference in volume!
Source: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a
"Doesn't THAT contribute to global warming trends?"
I'll bet John Kerry hates Ivanpah as much as he does the heat-spewing air conditioning systems. /s
The Ivanpah Solar Plant & Barbecue
“Omly” three birds a day?
BS.
Oh, and NONE of those 1200 birds (that were not killed by this site!) were endangered! Yeah. Right.
soebarkah envisioning his wasteland....
I wonder how many birds DDT killed?
More shovel ready jobs from Odumbo ...
none
Yeah, battling globull warming by generating “intense, concentrated heat” as stated in the article. Only leftists could think that was a good idea.
Please insert Rotisserie-Roasted chicken photo here.
I agree that cats are the number one killer of birds. However, a “billion” is a big number. Let’s see: my parents’ cat kills 12 birds a year and is the only cat on the street. Thus, to be a billion dead birds, we would need (one billion divided by twelve) and 830,000,000 cats. And there are 90,000,000 cats in the United States. Thus, perhaps USA kitties kill 1-3 million birds each year.
Solar is a waste of space, since solar breaks even after 75 years and we need a space the size of Oregon to power Los Angeles with solar.
Are they scared they’ll see bird boobs or what?
o.O
all this and who can say what the impact on the Bee’s , or the Dragon Fly’s , and so on.
I’m for taking these plants offline ASAP.
There should have been a ECO study about all this, it’s just not a good thing.
Close up Solar and Wind Power ASAP and... until we can study the long term impacts on the Eco system with all this killing of Birds , Bees, and various other flying objects!
Where did you get the idea the Greens want this project? They have bee strongly opposed to it from day one. Where did you come up with that. Just curious is all.
The enviromentalist do not favor this project. I keep seeing statements in this thread stating they support it. Where does that come from?
I'm not a starling fan either, but there are no starlings out there in the Mojave Desert wilderness. I've done bird surveys several years ago for affiliates of Ivanpah. From my experience, most of the carcasses are neotropical migrants and, of course, some resident bird species.
It's truly pathetic that the hypocritical greens allow this to continue. I always ask the idiot libs this: What is it about birds that you hate so much? Maybe that will get them to consider the hypocrisy of their position.
Not many. The possible main victims of DDT were eagles in thinned eggs but DDT was not shown to be a major killing of wildlife. Rachel Carson used bad science and possibly fraudulent science to write “Silent Spring”.
DDT has been used on humans since at least WW2, esp. in malaria/mosquito ridden areas like Sicily and No. Africa. Tens of millions of humans have died from malaria because of the non-use of DDT.
There are trade-offs in life.
I can’t find a strong enough mosquito spray to kill some really nasty critters in my yard. I spray them and, like Bobcat Goldwaithe in “Police Academy”, they use it as a mouthwash.
I kill more mosquitoes by hitting them with a can then I do with the actual spray. (RAID, fair. The other one, Red can - not so good. Natural Bat - really good; manmade bat - awesome.)
How many birds did cats kill before humans infected Mother Gaia?
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