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.
Better the coyotes eat their poultry cooked.
Of course!
You may not remember, but some mohammedan cleric declared that it was against their ‘god’ to look up at the underside of a bird in flight.
So to them, What’s a bird or two?
Obama and the Greens, Bird and Bat Murderers... SMH.
Someone must pay for the advancement of technology, .. and in the name of battling globull varming.. yaknow.. birds fry.. and get whacked by wind turbines.
The chicks of nesting that were fried also died.
Doesn't THAT contribute to global warming trends?
Are LIB degenerate ideas funny as a barrel of monkeys? Hahahahahaha. Where are the audobon econuts on this? What hypocrites.
I'd suspect so. Butterfly effect and all that.
Got to wonder how many birds all the wind farms are taking out each year too.
Horror at the world’s largest solar farm days after it opens as it is revealed panels are SCORCHING birds that fly over them
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3410970/posts
Could California’s massive Ivanpah solar power plant be forced to go dark?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3410908/posts
California Regulators Give Ivanpah Solar Plant More Time
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3410943/posts
Eliminate the subsidy for Ivanpah.... the fatalities will plunge after the outfit goes bankrupt....
If somebody like you or I killed a bird on the protected species list, like a Golden Eagle, we would get a big fine and a year in prison. Rules only apply to us little people.
1400 birds is not very many. 2/3 of them are likely starlings, in which case, burn more.
Feral cats are the leading cause of death among both birds and mammals in the United States, according to a new study, killing 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion birds each year.
The mammalian toll is even higher, concluded researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ranging from 6.9 billion to 20.7 billion annually.
The analysis, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that feral and owned cats pose a far greater threat than previously thought. One study in 2011 estimated that cats in the United States kill roughly half a billion birds annually.
It was SO hot around the Ivanpah Super Solar alternative energy plant today-
HOW HOT WAS IT?
It was so hot that the 500 degree air charred birds in mid-flight above it, and the FDA charged them with cooking food without a license.
Smells like global warming, eh?
The libs will probably pass a law that the power company has to put up signs in order to direct the birds to go around that area. Yes - libs are that delusional...
They’ll go belly up like the rest of them. 1.6 billion dollars down the toilet. any time a company says they have “largely solved” a problem, means they might be close to figuring it out, but it isn’t fixed yet.
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