Uh, oh. From NatureWorldNews
![crescent-01[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/crescent-011.jpg?quality=83)
“It’s no secret that solar power is hot right now, with innovators and big name companies alike putting a great deal of time, money, and effort into improving these amazing sources of renewable energy. Still, the last thing you’d likely expect is for a new experimental array to literally light nearly 130 birds in mid-flight on fire.
And yet, that’s exactly what happened near Tonopah, Nevada last month during tests of the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project.”
“According to Rudy Evenson, Deputy Chief of Communications for Nevada Bureau of Land Management (NBLM) in Reno, as reported by Re Wire, a third of the newly constructed plant was put into action on the morning of Jan. 14, redirecting concentrated solar energy to a point 1,200 feet above the ground.”
“Unfortunately, about two hours into the test, engineers and biologists on site started noticing “streamers” – trails of smoke and steam caused by birds flying directly into the field of solar radiation. What moisture was on them instantly vaporized, and some instantly burst into flames – at least, until they began to frantically flap away. An estimated 130 birds were injured or killed during the test.”
“Officials behind the project have refuted that claim, saying that most of the streamers are floating trash or wayward insects, but federal wildlife officials have begun calling these ‘eco-friendly’ power towers “mega traps” for wildlife.”
Surprisingly:
“US Fish and Wildlife Service officials are now waiting for a death toll for a full year of operation at the Ivanpah plant. The subsequent report may impact plans for future solar power towers in the United States.”
h/t to WUWT reader “catcracking”
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Arthur4563, stop using real numbers. Green numbers are different and prove that no birds are harmed, the amount of power generated is infinite and completely free of all costs and the whole thing requires no space at all.
Let’s compare nuclear power plants with reality: when things go wrong, many square miles of habitable land becomes uninhabitable including entire cities so far. Not to mention the entire Pacific Ocean polluted with nuclear waste materials that affect everything there.
Nuclear power is a mega-disaster in waiting with no fixes possible once it happens.
Mega solar power plants are stupid ideas. The birds dying is obvious from day one and easily foreseen. It is an abuse of the concept of solar energy! The idea of putting panels on private roofs owned by the people using this energy mainly to run air conditioning and other day time things is a great idea.
These giant plants focusing sun on a tower is a very dangerous, stupid and inefficient idea.
“Not to mention the entire Pacific Ocean polluted with nuclear waste materials that affect everything there.”
emsnews: Your statement is completely false. Completely. No matter how you try to spin it, 110 tons of nuclear material cannot “pollute” 660 million billion tons of seawater. So go and peddle your ignorance at a Grist blog, where they lap that up in an uncritical frenzy. Dave Suzuki loves you.
What?
Do you mean that ~.0000002 parts per billion/seawater isn’t scary enough? Go figure.
BS!
The whole Pacific gets more contamination from volcanic sources than it got from Fukishima. Nuclear is fairly safe. No one died from Three Mile Island, very few will have died from Fukishima (more die from accidents at conventional power plants than from this accident). The contaminants will eventually sink to the bottom, but there will be a brief period where contamination will be detectable in the higher predators in the food chain. So we will have to screen the catch for contaminants and send those with contaminants to the deep ocean bottom. Luckily most of these uranium fission daughters have short half lives and by the time they resurface will be in much more benign forms.
Nuclear power, when managed correctly (as most plants are!) is safer than coal or gas fired plants and have fewer accidents than almost any other industrial plant as well.
“Officials behind the project have refuted that claim, saying that most of the streamers are floating trash or wayward insects”
Refuted with the certainty of a climate modeller on a witch hunt.
” …floating trash …”? I’ve worked as a geologist in desert in this part of the world and have found very little trash that has floated in, mostly feral party balloons.
In order to get a streamer, there must be some very big INSECTS, like prehistoric M. permiana, was probably the largest insect that ever lived: its wingspan could exceed two feet (60cm), and its body grew to nearly 17 inches (40 cm). But I thought they were extinct already. Streamer insects, hide the children and small dogs.
This topic was well discussed here 6 months ago in the context of the Ivanpah installation:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/18/a-birds-eye-view-of-the-bird-scorching-ivanpah-solar-power-plant/
I think that it was subsequently revealed on this site , that the performance of the plant was so low that its output required considerable backup from diesel or gas generators , and that the losses for the promoters , including Google , were so large that they were petitioning Washington for more subsidy. I cannot however find that record , so I may have read it elsewhere.
Ivanpah has natural gas backup to keep things operating, and is using much more than expected. See http://www.kcet.org/news/redefine/rewire/solar/concentrating-solar/ivanpah-solar-plant-owners-want-to-burn-a-lot-more-natural-gas.html which says in part:
Thank goodness for cheap shale gas!
Slice and fry -avian fries for a tasty treat to cool the heat.
The solution is obvious: the EPA will simply issue a regulation requiring all flying creatures to remain at least 500 feet from the installation boundary. There. See how easy that was?
Coupled with a new “common core” initiative to teach birds how to read NOTAM’s.
Federal airspace is not regulated by the EPA but the FAA.
If the FAA were to put the airspace around the power plant into the same category as the airspace around the Washington DC and the White House, all birds trying to enter would get a couple of F-16’s to escort them off the premises to a safe landing place where they would have an interview without coffee with the DHS.
Chris Clarke at KCET has a good series of articles on concentrating solar power at Ivanpah, Tonopah is new, try
https://www.google.com/search?q=tonopah+solar+power+kcet
https://www.google.com/search?q=ivanpah+solar+power+kcet
Did they ever approve the re-naming of Ivanpah to Icarus? Made sense to me.
Beat me to it.
No fair Marnof a very large number of greens are scrambling to google what in the heck an Icarus is!
New idea for a “Dirty Jobs” episode, scraping the bird, bat and bug parts off of solar reflectiing mirrors.
And who is going to write “Silent Spring” this time?
Still, the last thing you’d likely expect is for a new experimental array to literally light nearly 130 birds in mid-flight on fire…………said the idiots that approved this
Everyone else with 1/2 a brain saw it coming….
I really shake my head on this….we have some ducks land on a tailings pond and the world condemns it…and this? silence…
Silence from the VERY same group who demanded Exxon pay hundreds/thousands? per sea bird affected by the Valdez disaster but – obtained a waiver for bald eagles killed by wind turbines. Their hypocrisy is breathtakingly vile.
We live in Nevada and have driven by that plant a couple times. Pretty impressive from the highway.
Don’t worry about the birds. They have worked out the offset. Some of us in Reno have been asked to put out an extra bird feeder.
@ur momisugly D Caldwell: So you are exactly saying what the Greens do, Divert, deflect and it will go away ( unless you forgot to put a Sarc at the end).
Thought it was sufficiently absurd to be obvious.
Sorry. I was being sarcastic.
I guess the WWF and Audubon Society are too busy with lobbying to be bothered with birds.
http://www.audubon.org/press-release/interior-dept-rule-greenlights-eagle-slaughter-wind-farms-says-audubon
“Instead of balancing the need for conservation and renewable energy, Interior wrote the wind industry a blank check,” said Audubon President and CEO David Yarnold. “It’s outrageous that the government is sanctioning the killing of America’s symbol, the Bald Eagle. Audubon will continue to look for reasonable, thoughtful partners to wean America off fossil fuels because that should be everyone’s highest priority. We have no choice but to challenge this decision, and all options are on the table.”
That’s why they’ll NEVER see a donation from me!
Reblogged this on "Mothers Against Wind Turbines™" Phoenix Rising… and commented:
Solar
Solar power tower causes an est. 130 birds to be killed or injured during test run…
Assessing an accurate death toll may in fact be very difficult. For every bird that flies close to the tower where the light is concentrated enough to ignite their feathers – there will be dozens more that flew a little further away from the tower and were only slightly singed and or slightly blinded.
How will those birds be tracked? The ones still able to fly might travel miles from the facility but will be expending far more energy because of their singed flight feathers. I strongly suspect many of that group will also die but never be counted. In harsh places like a desert there is little room for such degradation of the ratio of an animal’s foraging activity against the amount of energy they expend to forage. When you are living “on the edge” it doesn’t take much to push you over it.
Also there is the issue of eyesight degradation. Maybe they can fly just fine but can no longer see well enough to find food or water or … potential predators in time… etc.
And, as I and others have mentioned before, these facilities look like shimmering bodies of water in the desert from miles away (and those very areas used to be lakes anyway). The only natural substance that reflects sunlight and the color of the sky over a large area is .. liquid water. What could be more attractive than that to any bird flying around in the desert?
No need to bring lunch!
The birds are unimportant. They didn’t vote for Democrats.
Maybe the dead ones will.
Milk came out my nose!
Shhhhh! tadchem. If people knew how many warblers, rats, ground hogs, and skunks vote for Democrats there might be a recount every 49 years or so.
I have a question. Isn’t all of this “Green” technology supposed to help slow or stop climate change, which in turn is supposed to slow or stop the number of species that become extinct?
How do we do that if our “Green” technology is killing birds and animals, which if it keeps going long enough must surely cause species extinction? Wind-farms attract bugs, which in turn attract birds which get injured/killed by the massive blades of the turbines. Now this device reflects and concentrates sunlight, burning birds who fly through the “cone of death”. None of the experts saw this coming either. None of the experts ever burned ants with a magnifying glass either– a hobby my younger brother had for a few years.
If the sun can be concentrated by reflectors with enough intensity to turn water into steam to run a generator, it can sure enough burn anything that flies too close.
Off color … “The Hobby” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j56hhPyEz-g
You can feel the heat generated by the Ivanpah solar facility as you drive past …
It’s liquid sodium, held in storage overnight to keep the heat handy. There are some water systems, but this isn’t one of them.
Tonopah is molten salts. That probably is a much better material. It takes three months to melt all the salts, and then they can run the thing 24 hours per day, but clearly not at the full peak sun generating capacity.
I agree that they are learning going from water to Sodium to molten salts, but it is still a stupid waste of real estate, just to prove you can improve the engineering design; but you can’t ever overcome the simple optical geometry problem.
https://pilotweb.nas.faa.gov/PilotWeb/radiusSearchAction.do?formatType=ICAO&geoIcaoLocId=MMTJ&geoIcaoRadius=5&openItems=&actionType=radiusSearch
* FDC 4/2243 – CA..AIRSPACE IVANPAH DRY LAKE, CA. SOLAR
POWERPLANT GLARE THE LAS VEGAS / LAS / VORTAC 193 RADIAL RADIAL 36
NAUTICAL MILES TO THE LAS VEGAS / LAS / VORTAC 189 RADIAL RADIAL 34
NAUTICAL MILES. THIS PLANT COVERS APPROXIMATELY 3,500 ACRES WEST OF
INTERSTATE HIGHWAY 15 NEAR THE CALIFORNIA-NEVADA STATE LINE WITH
ROUGHLY 175,000 MIRRORS SURROUNDING EACH OF THREE COLLECTION TOWERS.
THESE TOWERS EMPLOY A NEW TECHNOLOGY THAT HAS NOT BEEN UTILIZED AT
THIS LEVEL BEFORE, CREATING A SOLAR GLARE EFFECT IN THE AIRCRAFT.
LOS ANGELES AIR ROUTE TRAFFIC CONTROL CENTER (ARTCC) AND LAS VEGAS
TERMINAL RADAR APPROACH CONTROL (TRACON) BEGAN RECEIVING NUMEROUS
PILOT REPORTS OF GLARE ASSOCIATED WITH THE POWERPLANT SINCE THE
FACILITY BEGAN PRODUCTION. TO APPROPRIATELY DOCUMENT THESE
CONDITIONS, PILOTS AND OTHER AIR CREW MEMBERS ARE URGED TO UTILIZE
NASA’S AVIATION SAFETY REPORTING SYSTEM (ASRS) AND PROVIDE AN
ELECTRONIC REPORT SUBMISSION (ERS) VIA THE WEB AT
http://ASRS.ARC.NASA.GOV/REPORT/ELECTRONIC/HTML SOLAR POWERPLANT
GLARE MAY BE INJURIOUS TO PILOTS’/PASSENGERS’ EYES FROM SURFACE TO
UNLIMITED ALITITUDE FROM GLARE SOURCE. FLASH BLINDNESS OR COCKPIT
END PART 1 OF 2. 24 DEC 21:30 2014 UNTIL 31 DEC 15:59 2016 ESTIMATED. CREATED:
24 DEC 21:31 2014
Here’s a shot from a plane 30-40 miles away from Ivanpah (half way down the page). You can see the bright glare from the 3 towers in the distance.
http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?day=18&month=12&year=2014&view=view
Bad news also for ’emsnews’ up-thread (emsnews March 2, 2015 at 6:15 am). She’d better give up flying pronto if she’s scared of radiation – 10 times as much at 39,000ft as there is at ground level.
No such photo. Sunspots and coronas only.
130 birds – per 2 hours – in the desert. That doesn’t sound very sustainable. I’m sure it will drop once all the birds are dead.
Sounds like you need this solar array to be designed like an aviary – to keep the birds out, rather than to keep them in.
It’s hardly a hugely expensive addition to project costs, after all……at least I don’t think it would be……
They’re already deep into the hopper on efficiency – https://www.biggreenradicals.com/solar-plant-we-need-more-natural-gas/
Tell me the one about banning DDT to save the birds again.
Way to give Gaia the bird.
This bird frying problem has an obvious solution:
Operate the plant at night when the birds are not flying!
Sorry, but thank goodness, most bird migration takes place at night. Years ago, during the right times of year, you could see many huge flights of them on the old analog radar screens at the FAA Air Traffic Control Centers. The slaughter would be unimaginable if one of those flights tried to pass during the day.
ROTFLMAO … too good for words! But the bats ?