Murphy’s Law in Action – Which to choose? Save the bats or save the planet? This presents an environmental quandary. – Anthony
Wind Turbines Give Bats the “Bends,” Study Finds
August 25, 2008
Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests. Scientists aren’t sure why, but bats are attracted to the turbines, which often stand 300 feet (90 meters) high and sport 200-foot (60-meter) blades.
The mammals’ curiosity can result in lethal blows by the rotors, which spin at a rate of about 160 miles (260 kilometers) per hour.
But scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine bases showed any physical evidence of being hit by a blade.
A surprising 90 percent showed signs of internal hemorrhaging—evidence of a drop in air pressure near the blades that causes fatal damage to the bats’ lungs.
In humans, the condition is called the bends and can affect divers and airplane passengers during ascents and descents.
(Related story: “Military Sonar May Give Whales the Bends, Study Says” [October 1, 2003])
The “Bends”
“As a turbine blade goes around, it creates lift—like an airplane’s wings—and there is a small zone of [dropping] pressure, maybe a meter or so in diameter, on the tips of the blades,” explained Baerwald, a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary, in Alberta.
“Bats fly through this area, and their lungs expand, and the fine capillaries around the edges of the lungs burst.”
The bats’ lungs subsequently fill with fluid, and the animals essentially drown.
“We compare it to divers—they are pretty much dying of the bends,” Baerwald said.
Bats have no natural defense against the unnaturally dramatic pressure changes.
“Bats can actually detect pressure changes, but we’re talking large-scale, relatively slow changes, like the coming of a storm front,” said Baerwald. “This is something entirely different.”
Most bats that fall victim to turbines are migrating species, such as hoary bats, eastern red bats, and silver-haired bats.
There are not enough data to determine how wind turbine fatalities might be affecting populations of these slow-reproducing mammals.
Birds are also killed by blows from wind turbine rotors (see a related story), but their rigid, tubelike lungs can better withstand air pressure changes.
The study appears this week in the journal Current Biology.
Curiosity Killed the Bat
“They are the first to have done a large scale look at this [damage to the bat lungs],” Bat Conservation International (BCI) biologist Ed Arnett said of the researchers.
“It’s fascinating information,” said Arnett, who is not involved with the study.
“But ultimately it might not matter so much how [the bats] die but what is attracting them to the turbines in the first place.”
Preventing the bat deaths has challenged experts for years.
“We’ve partnered with industry and federal agencies to raise and spend about two million dollars looking for a solution,” said BCI founder and president Merlin Tuttle.
Laurie Jodziewicz, of the American Wind Energy Association in Washington, D.C., said where the turbines are placed may be the key.
“Bats are not being [killed] at all the wind projects all over the country—it is happening in some places and not others,” she said.
“We’re trying to determine before construction what areas might be risky.”
Turbines create drops in pressure drop during normal operations, so the problem could possibly be addressed by changing when the turbines run, according to BCI’s Tuttle.
“A large portion of the kills occur at the lowest wind speeds,” he said, “and at those low speeds [the turbines] are not generating appreciable electricity anyway.”
Bats also are at particular risk during migration periods in late summer and early fall, when many turbine related fatalities occur.
Arnett, Baerwald, and others are currently conducting tests to see if raising the “cut-in” wind speed at which rotors begin to turn will save bats—particularly during peak migration periods.
“It won’t eliminate the problem, but it’s a good step in the right direction,” Tuttle said.
Just pust some high frequency noise generating thing-a-ma-bob on the wind generator that drives the bats away.
At first I though Pickens had “bats in his belfry” when he first announced his plans for a mega wind farm. But as things unfolded, this shrewd manipulator has shown us once again that the public can be be “had” through scares and innuendo.
Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com
Like wind chimes?
Your subtitle says this is an environmental quandary, but for a true environmentalist, it is not. Since bats are a part of pure beautiful nature, and humans are a virus, the answer is easy, we must all die, or live in caves like bears, with no power sources at all.
You might think I am being too harsh on the environmentalist, but then you have not read Paul Watson (http://www.seashepherd.org/editorials/editorial_070504_1.html)
From the article: “But ultimately it might not matter so much how [the bats] die but what is attracting them to the turbines in the first place.”
Observation from when I was a kid: In the twilight of the day when the bats were coming out for dinner, we’d throw rocks into the air and the bats would follow them down. The best we could tell, the bat’s radar system thought the rock was food.
Could it be that bats think the moving turbine blades are swarms of insects?
Anthony, notwithstanding the designs that T. Boone has on the U. S. Treasury via subsidies, one has to consider the usefulness of the bats (excepting those bats in Washington, D. C.) to Nature as opposed to the esthetic value of millions of turbines beautifying the countryside and disruption in the environment resulting from their construction and interconnection.
My vote is for the non-politician bats.
There are currently 15,000 turbines in California – Tehachapi, Altoona and another location which I do not remember – which supply a whopping 1% of California’s electricity needs.
Bats and birds are the least of the environmental damage that would ensue from T. Boone’s quest for another billion dollars.
What part of the planet is the T. Boone-Pelosi duo going to save. It does not sound like it includes the United States of America.
Like wind chimes?
——-
More like those sirens that are supposed to keep deer from crashing into your car.
This isn’t the first “environmental quandary” to hit the fan, so to speak. I’ve been wondering*, for quite some time, why the mainstream EnviroLoons™ haven’t jumped all over T. Boone, Gorebot, Hansen and all of the other Glow Bull Worming™ freaks for their remarkable lack of “caring” about the avian death toll that will result from hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of wind turbines being erected all across North America.
For years now, incredibly large numbers of migratory birds, including protected birds of prey, have been being Cuisinart’d™ by the spinning blades of wind turbines. In fact, it was a scant four and a half years ago that the Center for Biological Diversity sued the owners of a wind turbine farm in the Altamont Pass, FP &L, for just doing exactly what their fellow EnviroLoons had forced them to do— building wind turbines as an “alternative energy to fossil fuels”.
Where are those howls of indignation and protestation, now that the Obamessiah has jumped on the windmill bandwagon? * Crickets chirping*
Just imagine the lawsuits that are coming down the pike when hundreds of thousands of square miles of “pristine desert” are slated for “efficient solar electricity farms”. (Reeeeal efficient when it’s nighttime, raining or cloudy. Back-up systems [Read: Oil, gas or coal] will still be need to be built, maintained and staffed for just such contingencies and, as anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with large-scale power generation systems knows, they don’t like to be brought up, shut down, brought up, shut down…)
*—(I’m not really “wondering”. I know the answer. It’s because they don’t want to be cut out of The Great Goreacle’s™ Glow Bull Worming Carbon Credit Ponzi Scheme™ profits.)
My new motto: “Think Globally, Drill Locally!”
There’s speculation in these parts that Picken’s real motivation isn’t wind, but water. He’s been wanting to pump the Ogallala for years, and sell it to DFW. He recently got the Tx utilities board to grant him the electricity users of Tx paying the multibillion $ of transmission lines, and oh, by the way, he’s going to put the water line on that ROW as well. In the coming years, as the DFW population continues to expand, that water is going to be worth a lot more than the little bit of electricity he can generate. Oh, and also, he created a local water district that consists of a board controlled by the eight people that live in the area he will be pumping from: family members, and employees of his. Just coincidence, of course.
Nuclear power was supposed to make electricity too cheap to meter. When was it exactly, that Americans lost their nerve with regard to progress? France gets 80% of her electricity from nuclear power plants.
Vive la France!
bikermailman (16:21:38) wrote: “There’s speculation in these parts that Picken’s real motivation isn’t wind, but water.”
This is fascinating! Is there any information out there to support this?
Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com
What sane person could possibly have a ‘quandary’ weighing up the welfare of bats vers humans? And what do we mean save the planet? Is it epxected to go somewhere? Or is global warming expected to vapourise x squillion tonnes of rock?
I hate cliches.
So if we move into caves, won’t that disturb the bats’ environment? But you all are missing the real danger.
The turbines are attached to the ground. The wind pushing on all those turbines will cause the rotation rate of the Earth to speed up, making all our clocks run slow. In addition, this rotation increase will affect the moon/ocean tide system, causing the moon’s distance from us to increase more rapidly, at least 3 to 6 degrees C over the next century, which will lessen its gravitational influence on the tides, which will disturb the El Niño and who knows what that will do to the climate. My computer simulation graphs show a rapid departure from the norm, resembling a hockey stick.
We can’t afford to wait. We must do something now. Anything.
Boone-doggle!
This ought to be driving Mr. Pickens batty !!
Not only are the windmills killing birds, they’re also killing bats. Break out the Environmental Impact studies. Let’s tax people more so that greater subsidies can be given to wind farm operators so they can enclose their wind farms in screening to protect birds and bats. What other loony ideas can environmentalists come up with?
Just look at the site JB (15:00:02) cited above:
http://www.seashepherd.org/editorials/editorial_070504_1.html
I don’t know about you, but that sort of vision of living (and dying) in harmony with nature’s not for me.
And for anyone wondering about the roots of AGW, check out this piece from the Fall 2007 issue of 21st Century Science and Technology. Quit blaming Maggie Thatcher; it was another Maggie that got the ball rolling on this scam:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/images/PDF_2.gif
That’s enough depressing reading for one evening. But first, here’s another depressing thought to dampen your Monday evening — if any of your friends or neighbors have solar panels or wind mills, those are there thanks to your tax dollars being put to work with half the cost of those individual projects being paid for with subsidies from the state. The question I’ve never seen answered is, will those structures still be working in the 30 years it takes for them to begin paying off the the initial cost of the project? Never see that little detail mentioned in the MSM’s little puff pieces on how to be environmentally responsible. But that, after all, is a question only a real journalist would raise.
Jack,
Back in April this article was in the Dallas Morning News:
T. Boone Pickens to import water, wind power to North Texas
For those who missed it, this Business Week article explains how Pickens is using the windmill stalking horse as P.R. cover for his scheme to corner the water market and pump the Texas aquifer dry.
Maybe someday enviromentalists will learn that there are trade offs in everything you do. First they want wind power, now its bad…when does it end?
I guess when A-Rod hits a pop fly he can just blame his dead bat on Pickens.
Steven Milloy at Junkscience.com has several items on T.Bone’s plans.
I have a question: Windmills take some energy out of the wind (duh). What effect does that have? Slowing the wind down has to change something. Since winds mostly blow from west to east, it could speed the earth’s rotation up, but it would take NIST’s 10^-18 resolution to detect it.
Dead birds, dead bats. Perhaps the Law of Unintended Consequences has reappeared.
They’ve taken our dams.
They’ve taken our nuclear plants.
They’ve taken our coal plants.
Now they’re going to take our windmills.
They will not be happy until we’re riding horses and living in caves again…
Wyatt A (17:23:43) wrote: “Jack, Back in April this article was in the Dallas Morning News”
Thanks for taking the trouble of finding it, Wyatt!
Jack “McGrats” Koenig
I love to be nit picky but this one is too easy.
What the bats apparently suffer is ‘pneumothorax’ caused by a sudden reduction of pressure allowing pressure in the lung to over inflate and rupture tissue. Similar to SCUBA divers breathing compressed air and ascending without exhaling.
Bends on the other hand is gases, namely nitrogen, entrained in the blood under pressure and expanding into bubbles causing random damage to muscle and nerve tissue. This could happen to bats if they went to more than eighty thousand feet for an extended period of time but would not be expressed in the lungs.
B.C. – That’s “Think locally, Drill globally”
“They will not be happy until we’re riding horses and living in caves again…”
Did serfs ride horses?