Posted on 05/11/2023 9:49:07 AM PDT by george76
That rapidly growing wind power development kills birds in ever increasing numbers is clear. That it also kills whales and other marine mammals is becoming clear. So the policy question is how much killing is enough, before we stop killing more? This question seems not to be asked.
The stampede to build huge amounts of wind power, on land and at sea, is potentially devastating to a great many species. Our focus has been on the growing threat to whales and other marine mammals from offshore industrial wind.
But this is just part of a much deeper pattern of runaway wind killing. For now let’s consider the indifference of the Biden Administration to land based killing of birds.
To begin with there is the golden eagle. This majestic species is the largest bird of prey in western North America, where wind development is growing rapidly. Its population is much smaller than the familiar bald eagle and may be diminishing.
The golden eagle is protected under the Eagle Act, just as the whales are under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Wind facilities require so-called “incidental take permits” for killing golden eagles issued by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).
Turns out there is a problem, namely the wind industry is ignoring the Eagle Law and not getting the required permits. I am not making this up. Here is how the FWS puts it:
“For golden eagles, a goal of the 2016 Eagle Rule was to increase compliance and improve consistency and efficiency relating to permitting golden eagle take at wind-energy projects. However, those goals have not been realized. While participation in the permit program by wind energy projects has increased since 2016, it still remains well below our expectations. Low application rates and permit-processing requirements that some have perceived as burdensome have resulted in few permits being issued for wind projects as compared to the number of operational wind projects in areas where golden eagles occur. As a result, golden eagles continue to be taken without implementation of conservation actions to offset that take.”
So few permits are being issued to wind projects that threaten golden eagles and there are a lot of those.
Is the Biden FWS threatening a crackdown on this wanton lawlessness? Not at all. Instead they propose to make permitting easier by making it less effective. Endless billions of dollars worth of wind projects think eagle kill permitting is too “burdensome” so the Biden bunch propose to ease up on them. Damn the eagles, full speed ahead.
In fact the FWS proposal is to do away with site specific permits and instead create a “general permit” that covers all normal wind projects. All a billion dollar project has to do is sign up and pay a tiny fee, which supposedly somehow mitigates the upcoming eagle deaths.
As part of this general permit the eagle killing is exempt from NEPA, or rather the entire project is as long as eagle killing is all they are doing. No EIS certainly speeds things up, but not in a good way for the eagles.
Also the requirement that an independent observer count the dead eagles is gone in the general permit. We will just depend on the wind facility operators (who have not been getting permits) to tell us when they have killed too many birds.
Clearly this is a huge policy move that favors wind development at the expense of the eagles. Biden said that every federal agency should do whatever it can to promote renewables and this proposal meets that test.
Beyond the eagles, which are relatively small in number, there lie the rest of the dead birds. Wind turbines are called “bird choppers” for good reason. How many birds are we talking about killing?
Interestingly there was a lot of research on this question a decade ago, when wind just started winding up, but very little today. A good example is a 2013 paper titled “Estimates of bird collision mortality at wind facilities in the contiguous United States”, Biological Conservation, Volume 168, December 2013, Pages 201-209.
See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320713003522
They estimated about 250,000 bird deaths a year. With around 50,000 MW of installed capacity, that is roughly 5 deaths per MW per year. That is already a lot if dead birds, but it gets much worse when we look ahead at the Biden Administration’s goal of “net zero” emissions.
I recently wrote about a new Tesla analysis of the renewable power requirements for net zero. These are enormous because in addition to providing power when the sun shines and the wind blows hard, they have to make enough hydrogen to generate our juice when it doesn’t.
Tesla says we will need a whopping 2 million MW of wind capacity for net zero. At five bird deaths per MW that is an incredible 10 million deaths a year. This would be something like 300 million dead birds over the combined 30 year lives of the FWS proposed general permits.
It could be many more when the endless forest of bird choppers makes avoidance impossible. We really need some research into this horrendous prospect.
The vast majority of these dead birds will be songbirds. It is ironic that the environmental movement first took off with Carson’s “Silent Spring”, which warned about the potential extermination of songbirds. Now that we are rushing headlong into environmental industrialization it appears we have come full circle.
It is time to ask the policy question: How much wind killing do we want? Or put another way, how much is too much?
Birds not smart enough or too slow to avoid those huge slow moving blades are being culled from the gene pool.
I would imagine wave-powered generators would ingest a lot of small sea creatures too - you can put up a screen but you wouldn’t want to make it too fine or you’ll interfere with the wave energy
I’ll ping my friend who makes stuff go and makes other stuff do whatever that stuff is supposed to do
The end of those so called slow moving blades is like 200 MPH.
Fact check: No evidence offshore wind projects are killing whales on East Coast
Paraphrasing: “We had to save the whales in order to kill them.”
We have a windmill to pump water to our pond. It is not that big or tall and it is one by it's self.
Our neighbor has one as well, once again, not big or tall and set by his pond.
Quite a few of us have solar panels. A couple, three set either on the roof or on swivels.
You do not find any dead birds around because you do not have enough of them to impact things.
But when you have fields of windmills or fields of solar panels you have trouble.
Vibrations in the water causes problems with their echolocation system
The B75 turbine blade itself is 75 meters long, while the entire rotor assembly measures 154 meters in diameter. As it spins, the blades cover an area of 18,600 square meters—that’s roughly two and a half soccer fields—at a brisk 80 meters per second, or 180 MPH at the tips.
Moving that fast over such a large area generates a tremendous amount of force. About 200 tons of air press on the blade every second with wind speeds of just 22 MPH.
https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-blades-are-so-long-thei-5930272
The greenees insist that killing of whales and birds is inhumane.
The greenees insist that, killing of whales and birds is tolerable if it allows their green agenda to be fulfilled.
The green agenda is a fake excuse the the greenees, because, they don’t really care about the environment, but about having government control our lives. The greenees is a liberal organization which is really a division of the democrat party. The democrat party wants complete control over the American people, and to do so, they have to pretend to care about things. IOW, they are lying about everything they do, in order to achieve that control over the people and government.
In reality, it's just more 🐂💨💩.
Force the government to build giant fans under the guise of saving the environment. Make the citizens pay for them. Rake in the 💰💵💰💵.
Who cares if a bunch of birds are killed?
It is the air turbulence they cause that is one of the big problems.
Which is why our little ones do not have that problem.
What works in small does not necessarily work in big.
I had a Greenie tell me that the birds will just have to learn to fly someplace else. This remark after I pointed out that giant wind turbines on the ridges in Pennsylvania are flyways for migrating raptors and they’re being killed in great numbers.
They left out bats. Giant commercial wind generators are murder on bats because the vibrations seem to attract them. And they might have trouble “seeing” the blades, either visually or with echolocation, especially at the tip, because at 60 rpm, the tips of the blades on commercial-sized windmills are going more than 300 mph.
Without bats there’s be no tequila, mescal, or bananas, because they’re the largest natural pollinator of the agave plant and banana trees.
They reckon the one colony of bats in Bracken Cave (near San Antonio) provides hundreds of millions of dollars of agricultural benefits to central Texas farmers annually.
The Surprising Way Wind Turbines Kill Bats. ( Not just killing endangered eagles, song and other birds.).
It is the pressure change—not only the blades—that wipe out birds and bats at wind farms.. As turbine height increases, bat deaths increase exponentially.
As the wind moves through a wind turbine’s blades, pressure drops behind them by five to 10 kilopascals (a pascal is a unit of pressure), and any bat unlucky enough to blunder into such an undetectable low pressure zone would find its lungs and blood vessels rapidly expanding and, quickly, bursting under the new conditions.
Pressure drops of as low as 4.4 kilopascals kill common lab rats and all the bats autopsied showed internal damage and bleeding consistent with this type of death, known as barotrauma. “If bats have a lungful of air as they fly through the air-pressure change, there’s nowhere for the air to go,”
Baerwald explains. “The small blood vessels around the lungs burst and fill the lungs with fluid and blood.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-turbines-kill-bats/
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