Just when the green energy movement thinks they have it all worked out, along comes a snail-darteresque moment that throws a monkey wrench in green plans. These are the big fanboys in the panhandle, which I snapped a photo of near the Oklahoma- Texas border when I was doing USHCN site surveys in December. – Anthony
(From Bloomberg) — Iberdrola SA and E.ON AG’s turbine dreams for the windswept Texas Panhandle may be stymied by the mating rituals of the Lesser Prairie Chicken, a bird whose future could slow the pace of U.S. renewable energy growth.
Developers are scouring the sagebrush and grasslands of potential turbine sites for the ground-dwelling chickens, E.ON chief development officer Patrick Woodson said. Once plentiful in the southern high plains, the bird now has a high priority for listing under the Endangered Species Act, a move that will affect where as much as $11 billion in turbines can be built.
Federal protection for the chickens will hamper Texas’s plan to add 5,500 megawatts of wind power in the region by 2013, a 60 percent increase for the state. President Barack Obama wants to double all U.S. energy from renewable sources such as the wind and sun in three years to reduce dependence on imported oil and the greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming.
“The windiest parts of some of these states seem to be the areas that still have bigger concentrations of prairie chickens,” Woodson said in an Aug. 13 interview. “We need to plan for a worst-case scenario, which would be a listing.”
There may be as few as 10,000 Lesser Prairie Chickens left in the U.S. from an estimated 3 million in the 18th century. Many are still found in the panhandle, Texas’s northern tip that also boasts the best prospects for wind power, said Heather Whitlaw, a biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Electric-generating wind turbines inhibit the bird’s spring mating rituals, Whitlaw said on Aug. 11. Males jump, fight and show off bright yellow eye combs and reddish esophageal air sacks as they court females in an elaborate dance. The chickens have learned to avoid such mating displays around structures like turbine towers or utility poles where predators may perch.
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Ouch, listing under the ESA? That’s gonna hurt. Read the complete article here
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According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept., the hunt is on for Lesser Prarie Chicken habitat.
The Texas Panhandle area supports a large proportion of the remaining populations of Lesser Prairie-Chickens, so we all have an important opportunity to ensure conservation of the grasslands that support this icon of the Southern High Plains. It is important that we all work together to conserve and manage this unique grassland species. One of the challenges facing biologists and managers is the need to collect accurate census data in order to address the questions and concerns of whether Lesser Prairie-Chickens should be listed as a threatened species across their range. With your help and reports of observations, we will be able to determine how many prairie-chickens we have in Texas.
If you see this bird please contact any of the following:
Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept.
(http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/landwater/land/habitats/)
Heather Whitlaw
Box 42125, TTU
Lubbock, TX 79409-2125
Please provide details of the date, location and number of individuals seen. If possible include GPS coordinates. Did you happen to get a photograph or digital image? Your information is valuable and will help ensure the continued survival of this unique
grassland bird.
I’m sure WUWT readers would be glad to help.
h/t to Jeez
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009727245_apwaspottedowlwindfarm.html
And in the State of Washington:
Spotted owls block Skamania wind farm expansion
Plans for a wind farm on some state land in Skamania County are on hold because it’s spotted owl habitat.
I believe I have a current sighting of one – in my freezer. Delicious.
In the windfarms in southeastern Washington state, ornithologists do a weekly count of the dead birds hit by the blades. The mounting toll does not sit well with the Auduban Society.
The cure for the damages caused by wringing energy from the wind is always greater than the value of the energy thus wrung.
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Freudian slip? . . . that would be Audubon.
noaaprogrammer (22:01:32) :
Perhaps Anthony could put this running total of windmill-kill up on the site?!
There is a well known rabid pro-AGW blogger who appears on sites such as Real Climate who has a thing about photographing wild birds. I wonder what his take on this is?
REPLY: dhogaza is the handle he uses. Look up “dho gaza” and you’ll get why he uses it. He’s been banned from WUWT for one too many nasty denigrations he’s spewed about myself and others. He’s a bird photographer and sometimes SQL programmer. – Anthony
There is always some kind of an effect on wildlife how about the desert tortise catching five in the shade of a heliostat or other solar power collector, the caribou huddling around the heated oil pipeline, raptors getting “cuisinarted” by the windmills and now windmills and transmission lines disturbing the mating habits of prarie chickens. Not to mention the deer raccoons birds etc that end up as road kill (you might even be more prone to hit them with a quiet electric car) We just can’t win. Perhaps mountain top removal for coal mining isn’t as bad as it seems.
great article!
Mark Duchamp, a British ornitologist living in Spain has been driving the resistance against wind turbines there:
http://www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=1228
His articles provides a lot of information on the subjetc of bird killings and other aspect of the green lunacy.
Between NIMBY and endangered creatures it’s going to be pretty difficult to find places to put 200 times more windmills than we already have, to replace just our current electrical demand, let alone provide for any growth in supply. And given the notoriously poor performance and intermittent nature of wind power we’d probably have to double or even triple those numbers to have any hope of adequate supplies. There has been quite a bit of enthusiasm around here lately for flywheel systems to provide the necessary buffer to tide the windmills through slack wind and I certainly hope the new ones workout but having looked at the sites for some of the manufacturers claiming breakthrough technology I usually find the BS detector in the back of my head going off rather loudly. The idea is eminently feasible, but the implementations have been difficult and a lot of info on the flywheel websites is of the form of “If we can just get a truck full of money, we’ll be banging these things out in no time”. I’m willing to be convinced, but haven’t been, so far. Even if they do perform as described, we’re still left with the problem of where to build all these beauties and since the wind power is already seriously expensive the additional cost of the, presumably not cheap, flywheels will add to the subsidy required. Of course, if you’re filled with pure motives and good intentions you don’t really need to worry about the little details. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
‘
OT
A small spot has formed at 22:24 , on the 26th, latest soho for the moment . On the 17:00 line to the left of the burnt pixel. magnetic signature 24.
BTW, now that [Ted Kennedy has passed on], maybe that big wind project in the Atantic off Hyannis Port can finally set sail. I think it would be the most fitting memorial possible for the big windbag, if it was named in his honor.
Problem is also that these 5500 MegW’s of energy are “nameplate” ratings – reduce that a “on-line” factor of around 19 – 23 pert based on German, Denmark, and Spanish experience with their wind mills.
And even what power is generated is at irregular, unpredictable times that don’t match actual demands.
Compare also the hype and fear about bird deaths – which do occur! – to the hype and fears about CO2-induced global warming – which (at best) cannot be measured nor solved by nd turbines. Yet the wind turbines here cannot even be shown to threaten the actual numbers of these birds – the ecotheists are making press releases and runnig around trying to count birds in a prairie desert to make guesses about their impact.
That is, the impact of the birds on the turbines? Or the turbines on the birds?
Jimmy Haigh (22:16:53) :
noaaprogrammer (22:01:32) : There is a well known rabid pro-AGW blogger who appears on sites such as Real Climate who has a thing about photographing wild birds. I wonder what his take on this is?
REPLY: dhogaza is the handle he uses. Look up “dho gaza” and you’ll get why he uses it. He’s been banned from WUWT for one too many nasty denigrations he’s spewed about myself and others. He’s a bird photographer and sometimes SQL programmer. – Anthony
I know dhogaza well (online that is). I have tangled with him many a time on a site called “how to talk to a climate skeptic”, what an arrogant, condescending title! He and another guy there Ian Forrester called for me to be banned and eventually I was – the only way they could win an “argument” against me. dhogaza has a really foul tongue and specialises in abuse. I would love to meet up with him in person one day. He could do with learning some manners that he sadly lacks.
Consiudering how scarce the Lesser Prairirie Chicken is nowadays it is weird that it isn’t already listed. It is certainly vastly more threatened than the Polar Bear.
Dear me, we’ve become desperate.
Prairie chickens.
Taste more like grouse than chickens. Cook the same, though. Perfect on a bed of wild rice with a mild Chablis.
I gotta root for the windmill lobby on this one.
The wind industry is in a very ironic position. It’s not financially viable on its own and thus requires the government to compel consumers to buy its product. The justification for forcing the public to buy the overpriced product is environmentalism. But then it turns out that the greens are killing off wind power about as fast as they’re building it up. It’s a bit like the dog becoming dependent on the ticks. A couple of links discussing specific instances:
http://www.otherbrothersteve.com/?p=3263
http://www.otherbrothersteve.com/?p=2962
The “lesser prairie chicken” episode was tediously predictable. I spent the final 20 years of my career developing the required technology and then designing, building, owning and operating renewable electric power plants (solar and wind excluded because I deemed them uneconomic without unsustainable subsidies). I can guarantee from bitter experience that any power plant or powerline proposed, regardless of the technology to be employed, will be vigorously resisted by environmental intervenors IF THE PROJECT IS INTENDED TO TURN A PROFIT.
I got nothing but “negative declarations” (no environmental impacts perceived) during the years I was pouring money down a rat hole into experimental plants, trying to develope renewable technologies. I got nothing but vociferous environmental objections when I finally took those same technologies into commercial production. If it isn’t spotted owls or lesser prairie chickens it will be something else (I was once held up by “endangered grass” – I’m not making this up).
In the case of wind and solar, the pathetic energy density of the technologies dooms them to enormous physical footprints and no hope that “economy of scale” can, in the foreseeable future, render them remotely competitive with fossil-fired or even nuclear power generation. Economics aside, that enormous physical footprint exposes large-scale wind and solar development to an unwindable war with “environmental intervenors”, thanks to the absence of any “cost versus benifit” provision in the Environmental Protection Act.
As both Germany and Spain have learned the hard way, in addition to horrendous economics on its face, both solar and wind must be 100% backed up by conventional power generation if one expects the lights to come on when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Neither technology is then, by definition, a substitute for conventional generating capacity. Unless someone can devise a “magic flywheel” that will carry a windmill through several windless days or a solar plant that runs on moonlight, this fatal flaw cannot be overcome.
CH
The windmills is not the problem if you build them on chicken farm territory.
But wait until they make you wear wooden shoes (clogs) plant tulip and the Japanese come in to make pictures.
That is the moment life starts to become pretty embarrassing and inconvenient.
Ask the Dutch.
When you look at pictures of these mega-windmills you don’t really get a sense of their heroically monumental scale in real life.
Each one is kind of Hoover Dam given the context of the sagebrush height spreading towards the empty horizon, albeit hardly as useful at generating base load energy. Nevertheless, they are truly colossi of modern techno-industrial engineering and at the beginning of their era, rather than mature and greying. Oh, to be a young and irrationally exuberant technology again, sighs the fossil fuel to the 1969 Camaro! Those were the days, my friend. Those were the days.
Herculean wind turbines are both inspirational testaments of modern ingenuity – that American can-do spirit projecting itself beyond the envelope of the rationally mundane cost-versus-return economics – and terrifyingly sci-fi, pure white star ships parked in the back lot of Area 55. They paradoxically represent both the triumph of technology over nature and a Brave New World order where humanity is the mere servant of Gaia.
I kinda like the audacity of the ever accelerating techno-cultural evolution that wind turbines represent — that centrifugal thrill of a floored Z-28, while the contents of the ashtray slowly vortex out the window at 125 miles per hour.
Surely, that’s why a chicken that can’t really fly represents the only weapon neo-Luddites can wield as an axe to chop these beautiful machines down.
So what comes first. The chicken or the windfarm? 🙂
The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.
If wind farms worked they might be acceptable. In Australia our government has just passed a renewables bill that will see a proliferation of turbines across the country. The problem is that most who dont live near them see them as wonderful. Unfortunately some over 440 feet tall are within 800 yards of homes and we cannot get our pollies to force a buffer distance from residences to protect people from ultrasound, blade glint or shadow flicker, greenies care more about birds than people. In Macedon Ranges in central Victoria we have asked for a 2km buffer but this has been ignored by Roaring Forties and the State Government.
Now the real damages of the AGW-cult start to occur. I don’t speak of some stupid birds (Sorry for that….but it’s true).
I speak of massive destructions of the environment by wind turbines. I don’t speak of wind turbines in the US where they have plenty of space, I speak about wind turbines in the dense populated areas in Europe!! They destroy beautiful landscapes by their 50-100m high tubines!! IN THE NAME OF PROTECTION OF THE NATURE!
The “Greens” oppose everything, they oppose production plants, roads, everything to “protect the nature”. I even know about two cases where they killed two hydroelectric power plants, even they were planned at very remote areas!
The day is very near where I start “civil disobedience”, but the other direction than idiots like J. Hansen
Once when I was out sea-kayaking I came across a baby seal that had had its face ripped off by the propeller of a motor-boat.
Too graphic an image for some?
Wind power is not the answer.
Great story. A great Green policy halted by a great Green policy.
But that is the problem with the Green philosophy, it will never be completely sated until we are all back in mud huts and caves.
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