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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Oh i loved the comments on their homepage…
http://www.8newsnow.com/story/25218853/i-team-nevada-solar-plant-create-worldwide-buzz
Read it thanks, their quote “From a concentrated solar power standpoint, Tonopah is the center of the universe,” he said”
I got the drift, but as far as we know the “center of the Universe or our Galaxy” is a black hole.
At least they got that right this solar plant is a black hole, sucking in Taxpayers money never to be seen again.
uh what a great defence system at the border……
If a dry bird should fly by and burn dry and not stream poor thing not even in the count.
Or
Just how good are the eyes of the counters, and just how honest,
Or say it just makes the lady birds eggs go bad
or say it just makes the boy birds sex thing go bad
or
or
or
or
You touch on one point I didn’t think of – the mating rituals of some bird species are highly dependent upon feather coloring and display so reproduction success could indeed be adversely affected. A problem like that, if not thoroughly researched to be ruled out now, won’t otherwise be noticed until it’s TOO LATE!
** “Gee, the “streamer” rate seems to have decreased dramatically from last year so I guess the problem is … “going away!”
So yes … WHO is assessing all of the possibilities? Is it robust and being done honestly?
High priced bird kill.
Same as the bald eagle cuisinarts – just get an Obama waiver!.
“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.”
I find this dismissal of the bird killings quite revealing as to their tolerance for the killings, and that they don’t really care.
First, from the information provided, there is some uncertainty as to what is being vaporized since there may not be any means (remains) to measure thereafter, to determine what is causing the smoke.
Second who counts?
Last, does it take a year to measure, assuming they can, to get a count and, are they hoping that all birds in the neighborhood are virtually wiped out so the count goes down with time?
Do they think we are that stupid, ignoring this while they put others out of business with hefty fines for one bird who lands on a pond and has to be cleaned up!!
It’s the American version of Putin’s in your face tactics. I predict no news coverage at this site.
Takes a year to get data (that can then be massaged) to interpret and reinterpret. They need to make sure the “streamers” are actually birds before they count them; as they said, some of the “streamers” are big ass insects that just resemble birds.
After a year of data collection we will se that “Seasonal” killings represent a large percentage of the overall deaths … therefore, with a shut down for a few weeks here and there, the killings will be reduced by 87.6%. Now we can pat them on the back for saving 3,272 birds a year.
I’ll bet anyone here (without research) that there have already been numerous grant requests (maybe not for this facility, but for others) to study the bird death issue, as associated with windmills/solar arrays, so they can move forward with a solution.
Besides the green hypocrisy at work here due to the birds being fried, I also have to wonder about how all those mirrors are going to hold up long term in the face of sandstorms that will inevitably blow through the area–not to mention the sand that gets blown around on a daily basis.
Whoever has money invested in this idiocy and/or approved it obviously did not think things through very well before acting. As one how has a lot of respect for animals and wildlife, I will look forward with great interest to the day that they all get burned for it (pardon the pun).
y’know, and enterprising person could set up a food truck and feed the staff continuously .. just sayin’ 🙂
Geez…how ’bout we put the whole thing underground?
No, not the Greens; the entire solar array & steam tower.
This is really green engineering 101.
Makes sense to me.
I have often thought it would be a good idea to use such amirror array to focus the sun on the end of a “heat pipe” which either boiled sodium or molten salt or other phase change heat pipe, and channel that heat down that heat pipe to an underground shale oil region, so that it could melt the shale oil and then pump it out of the ground. They do that now by burning some of the shale oil in situ, so it heats the rest and melts the oil to pumping viscosity.
So why not use solar radiation to pipe heat down to the shale, so you don’t have to burn any of it underground.
Too many acres of wasted concrete, solar reflectors, controllers, heat-lamp collectors, controllers, pumps, miles of molten-salt piping over too many thousand acres of rough and unpaved terrain (often woods, fields, farms, trees, valleys, streams and wild areas or “across the (not-bridged) canyon” to put up a short-time use molten salt array and molten salt (retention ponds, coolers, heaters and command shacks) to pay for a few months of drilling. Oh – by the way, you get little solar energy in Alberta, ND, SD, ID, and the under the cloudy skies of PA, MI, MN, and OH.
Solution: generate steam, create an array of steam-driven ultrasonic whistles, use reflectors to focus sound within the danger zone. Birds hear the alarm and change course.
Thanks for keeping the truth before us.
Hundreds of birds??? Oil spill kills Millions of fish, thousands of sea birds, turtles,and a enormous amount other marine life. go figure.
But if it were Big Oil doing something that was killing these birds it would be an atrocity. Go figure.
Somebody devise a catapult to toss desert tortoises in the air.
Sounds like they will need gov funding for a new project to change the magnetic field of the earth so birds fly around the plant. Subsequently, gov funding for a project to re calibrate the sensors on planes to allow for the changes to the earths magnetic field will be required. Subsequently, gov funding….
I can see the saliva dripping already.
I’m going to apply for a job down there as a window washer, keep all the mirrors clean.
This problem is easily fixed, only allow the plant to run at night. It can probably provide the same energy to the grid using the gas is uses to heat the boiler to run generators instead. The mirrors are only markers for the subsidy farm anyway.
To the real environmentalists and conservationists these wildlife killings are a heartbreak.
To the real environmentalists and conservationists these killings are criminal.
Their excuse is that the streamers might be insects. Hmm, insects don’t count? Any butterflies, bees, etc. ever fly through that country? Maybe an endangered species or many endangered insects?
I can’t believe that at least some of the engineers on this project didn’t use a magnifying glass to burn small insects when they were kids. In building this —-thing—- it seems to me someone should have asked the question about birds and flying insects and—trash???? Get the contractors out to clean up the mess they made in the middle of the desert.
Mike
This is a better idea:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31682529
Hmm looks interesting but the BBC lie again… its not the worlds first there are others.. one in france since 1966 and bigger in terms of output too… again though environmental consequences could be quite high.. but what human activity docent have environmental consequence … we all breath (CO2) and *art (CH4)
All the pictures look very attractive but anyone who has sailed in the Bristol Channel will realize that the water is normally a filthy brown color.
the efficiency will pick up next weekend when we go Daylight savings time.
that is another joke we have to deal with.
From recovery to processing to manufacturing to deployment to operation to reclamation, green technology is a fairy tale. The sooner we acknowledge this and judge each technology on its full life cycle merits in context, the sooner we can have a rational discussion about reasonably advancing human productivity and welfare.
Hooray!
I wonder what faux Nobel laureate Camille Parmisan would make of this bird death? Can we hope she’ll be as hyperbolic about birds going “extinct” due to so-called green and renewable electrical generation as she was about not finding a few butterflies in certain areas due to alleged CAGW? And how do the Pika extinction alarmists come down on this issue? Is unbalancing the eco-systems of large swaths of desert and the direct killing of birds and bats in any way a problem for them?
My prediction: we’ll never know, because these cherry-pickin’ climate Scientologists won’t allow themselves to look at this information. It would upset their precious narrative.
SouthWest AirLine’s Milwaukee – SanFrancisco direct flight flies right over that thing. But I didn’t see any flaming birds.
Milwaukee to San Francisco? Are you kidding?
IN 2009 ExxonMobil was fined $600,000 for just 85 bird deaths that were spread over five years and across facilities in 5 states. The deaths amounted to less than 1 per year per site. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/exxon-fined-for-causing-bird-deaths/
Anyone want to guess how much the solar guys will be fined? Vegas has set the over-under at zero.
It could have been simply a culinary thing; maybe they were undercooked.
But…but…but…according to St. Suzuki, that’s NOT a lot of birds at all. Our pet cats, er companion felines, kill WAY more, so this can’t be a problem.
Or something. I can’t get green “logic”. It appears to be a bit lax in actually being logical.
130 is not “hundreds”
Thats 130 for 2hrs at 1/3rd capacity… scale it up!!!!
Hans, I do believe anything over “1” is plural.
As in 1.5 miles or 1.5 pounds. So, 1.3 hundreds is not incorrect.