It’s not just Wind Turbines that kill wildlife, from the Wall Street Journal:
“A giant solar-power project officially opening this week in the California desert is the first of its kind, and may be among the last, in part because of growing evidence that the technology it uses is killing birds.”
“The $2.2 billion solar farm, which spans over five square miles of federal land southwest of Las Vegas, includes three towers as tall as 40-story buildings. Nearly 350,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect sunlight onto boilers atop the towers, creating steam that drives power generators.”
“The owners of the project— NRG Energy Inc., NRG, Google Inc. GOOG and BrightSource Energy Inc., the company that developed the “tower power” solar technology—call the plant a major feat of engineering that can light up about 140,000 homes a year.”
“Ivanpah is among the biggest in a spate of power-plant-sized solar projects that have begun operating in the past two years, spurred in part by a hefty investment tax credit that expires at the end of 2016. Most of them are in California, where state law requires utilities to use renewable sources for a third of the electricity they sell by 2020.”
“Utility-scale solar plants have come under fire for their costs–Ivanpah costs about four times as much as a conventional natural gas-fired plant but will produce far less electricity—and also for the amount of land they require.
That makes for expensive power. Experts have estimated that electricity from giant solar projects will cost at least twice as much as electricity from conventional sources. But neither the utilities that have contracted to buy the power nor state regulators have disclosed what the price will be, only that it will be passed on to electricity customers.”
“The BrightSource system appears to be scorching birds that fly through the intense heat surrounding the towers, which can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The company, which is based in Oakland, Calif., reported finding dozens of dead birds at the Ivanpah plant over the past several months, while workers were testing the plant before it started operating in December. Some of the dead birds appeared to have singed or burned feathers, according to federal biologists and documents filed with the state Energy Commission.”
“Regulators said they anticipated that some birds would be killed once the Ivanpah plant started operating, but that they didn’t expect so many to die during the plant’s construction and testing. The dead birds included a peregrine falcon, a grebe, two hawks, four nighthawks and a variety of warblers and sparrows. State and federal regulators are overseeing a two-year study of the facility’s effects on birds.”
“The agency also is investigating the deaths of birds, possibly from colliding with structures, found at two other, unrelated solar farms. One of those projects relies on solar panels and the other one uses mirrored troughs. Biologists think some birds may have mistaken the vast shimmering solar arrays at all three installations for a lake and become trapped on the ground after landing.”
Steam can be very carbon neutral and much more benign to wildlife. I am referring to burning biomass.
Something I never see in the AGW’s calculus for solar farms: land acquisition costs.
They are building something like that close to us
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&newwindow=1&q=tonopah+solar+pelosi&oq=tonopah+solar+pelosi
Pelosi in on the the scam
Umm, duh! It has been a well known fact since the 60’s that guidance control radars on Naval Ships will fry sea birds at distances in excess of 100 meters, why anyone would be surprised at the result of the above is beyond me.
I live in Las Vegas and have drove past Ivanpah many times. It is impressive to see. But we already knew it’s a costly waste of money to run. Going Green is a big waste of green backs. So then, where are the bird watching groups and other animal groups? Ivanpah cooks the birds, wind turbines splatter them. Green – great idea huh?
Watch how quickly the so-called “environmentalists” demonstrate that they really couldn’t care less about dead wildlife, unless the deaths can be used to advance their political goals.
What a magnificent irony – in terms of wildlife preservation, Oil and Gas development is actually the most environmentally friendly source of large scale energy production available!
(even Hydro requires the sacrifice of thousands of acres of productive valley and river bottoms, see Hetch Hetchy)
Okay, I’ll tip my hat to the nuclear proponents – that doesn’t actually hurt any real wildlife, either.
It produces how much electrickery at night?
I’d love for the people who advocate ‘Green Energy’ to have to prove that it works by living with it as a sole source for twelve months.
John
This is beyond obscene. Solar is hugely inefficient and only operates when the sun is shining. Because no effective battery system can store the energy for when its needed during the night means that at best these huge bird scorching monstrosities only operate in daylight hours and then far more inefficiently than gas or coal. We consumers are paying a high price for the holier than thou worshipers of the global warming religion!
“State and federal regulators are overseeing a two-year study of the facility’s effects on birds.”
…rotfl
Reblogged this on Lake Erie Conservative and commented:
… fried fowl , yummy !…
One thought about solar panel farms is the fact that they are heat absorbers/sinks. It would be interesting to observe the temps 200 feet above the solar farms compared to the surrounding real estate. Are the farms themselves creating more warming than their emissions are supposed to reduce?
I’ve seen various claims about the acreage they require (solar panel farms, that is) – some studies have no doubt improperly used the the nameplate capacity as the generation capacity (which is roughly four times less than the nameplate capacity). I calculated 80,000 acres of solar panels required to match the gross output of a modern nuclear reactor.
I thought all of the solar thermal farms, such as this one, had been abandoned due to costs.
I heard a portion of an interview on NPR this afternoon where an environmental advocate hemmed-and-hawed around a proposed rewriting of wildlife protection rules so California could get more water for its growing population. Madness.
Just went to the BrightSource website, and submitted a comment recommending they do something cheap and easy, like put a ring of scarecrows around the 300,000 mirror power plant, or if they want to go all 21st century, install speakers to emit bangs / ultra-sonic pops to drive the birds away. (If keyed off the cameras / computers, it could be an almost environmentally friendly way to keep birds away from the plant / towers).
Not that I am pro-solar… The thing is a gigantic waste of both money, and the environment. Bah.
Anyways, 100 to 1 big solar pharma doesn’t do anything — other other than open a KFC outside the Ivanpah plant.
Fabi: Land cost, way out where it’s cheap & hot. Then the transmission cost.
OK. I’m a business man and I want to build a solar plant and sell the energy.
It’s 377MW at maximum output like the one above.
It’ll work on average 20% of the time giving me an ave output of 75.4MW or 75,400 kws = Power
Energy = It’ll produce 75,400 times 365 days times 24 hrs = 660,000,000 kwHrs/yrs
It’ll cost me 2.2 billion like above, so I”ll get a business loan at 6% for 30 years.
My yearly payment will be $158,000,000.
My cost to produce this electricity will be $158,000,000/660,000,00 kwhrs or
$.24 or 24cents per kwHr.
Since electricity can be bought wholesale for less than 5 cents per kwHr, I think I’ll get me a partner, the Federal Gov’t. Lucky for me, I can force people to buy my product, and not only force, them, they’ll feel they got a “bargain” and they will feel “good” about it too.
Anyone want to buy some FREE electricity?
Good conservation biology is going backward.In order to address CO2 fear-mongering and speculated wildlife devastation, tax dollar are being spent on projects that visibly are killing bats and birds. Its insane!
Just another demonstration of how so-called “renewable” energy is infinitely dirtier than fossil fuels.
The EPA is giving bird choppers a free pass on penalties for violating the Endangered Species Act. It’s a felony if you accidentally kill an eagle, but Duke Energy – a prime crony capitalist buddy of the Administration – got a pass on something like 84 dead eagles. The EPA is an accessory to a whole bunch of felonies here, methinks. And now we can figure they’ll give a free pass to bird fryers (and to birds killed by diving into solar panels thinking they’re water)
@fabi – No, they don’t include land, they don’t include the cost of fossil-fuel-powered spinning reserve and inefficient fast start fossil generation needed to protect the grid when the wind stops blowing or clouds cover the sun (resulting in up to 15 percent more fossil fuel burned to produce the same output of electricity), they don’t include the cost of transmission lines and substations, the cost of all the toxic chemicals needed to operate the installations, and the cleanup thereof.
By my calculations the real cost of either solar or wind, fully absorbed according to generally accepted cost accounting principles, is on the order of $2 per kWh.
Can’t these people get a unified front ? Are we saving birds and flooding humans, or killing our birds so our children’s children don’t have to see swaths of modeled dead Adelie penguin chicks ? Come on, let’s see some leadership here.
It would be a good idea to focus large arrays of solar mirrors to tall wind turbine towers and melt them to the ground. A double pronged attack is always more robust, than relying on a single solution. What is more, this way we could get rid of them in a carbon neutral way. This project only needs taxpayers’ money, of which there is plenty and savings on electricity bills would outweigh it anyway.
They produce zero energy at night necessitating they be backed up with a 24/7 generating system that can handle the entire nighttime load. That won’t be wind power.
What a foolish state.
12 Feb: UK Dailly Mail: Daniel Martin: So why wasn’t Thames dredged? In case a rare mollusc was disturbed – despite the region being described as one of the most ‘undefended flood plains in England’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2558087/So-wasnt-Thames-dredged-In-case-rare-mollusc-disturbed-despite-region-described-one-undefended-flood-plains-England.html
9 Feb: UK Daily Mail: David Rose: Agency for flooding that puts greater water parsnips and voles before local people
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2554940/Agency-flooding-puts-greater-water-parsnips-voles-local-people.html
CAGW causes…..unintended consequences.
Scandalously, the Audobon Society, never seems to complain when wind turbines slice and dice
our feathered friends (and possibly making our Whooping Cranes extinct).
I have flown past the Ivanpah facility at 6,500 ft. several times since December and can attest that it is blinding to a small plane on the opposite side of the valley. It is not surprising that it would fry birds that got closer.
Re: pat at 13 Feb 1635: “CAGW causes…..unintended consequences.”
Cynical rhetorical question: What makes you think the consequences are unintended? (/sarc)
Cheers –
$2.2 billion to power 140,000 homes. And how long will it last in that climate and what nightmares of maintenance? And if you think the birds are bad, wait until see private pilot accidentally goes overhead…