The United States Geological Survey (USGS) released the following footage showing flying birds and insects incinerated by the intense heat near the solar towers of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Facility.
Though USGS claims that “fewer than 15 birds were observed being impacted by the solar flux in more than 700 hours of video”, USGS curiously states, “we are uncertain of the origin of dark trails following the birds.” USGS also fails to quantify what percentage of the 700 hours of footage is duplicative (multiple cameras were utilized) or is of the solar flux when in actually operation (i.e. daytime vs. nighttime — much of the surveillance was nighttime thermal and infrared imaging of birds and bats).
A recent study found Ivanpah killed 6,185 birds in 2015, including about 1,145 that were burned up in the plant’s solar flux. Ivanpah has also been known to blind airline pilots flying over Southern California’s desert.
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Heaven help the nuclear plant that periodically ingests water foul (ask Crystal River retirees or DC Cook). Fines, reprimands, and a visit from your local environmental dogooder are swift. Take out a sea turtle and you’re into a whole new ballgame.
I’m just stunned by this. Lost for words.
There are those who do things because they can and not what they should do. And there is a big difference between the two.
Facts don’t matter. The “Greens” have decided that carbon-based energy is evil. Non-carbon energy is good! (no matter the cost in treasure, or wildlife).
Apparently there is no “non-carbon energy” here. Smoking birds are rich source of carbon by-product from the operation of the plant.
The government is now a lawless preditor upon us all, buying us off with our own money and near-infinite debt we are forced to service.
I haven’t posted this poem since my previous (stolen) identity days.
SUSTAINABLE REALITY
If you like your energy sustainable,
You must first make the climate trainable.
With sun day and night,
And the wind always right…
I think it just might be attainable!
Solar and wind are renewable,
But only on small scales prove doable
They kill birds and bats
And displace habitats…
Conservationists find them eschew-able.
We would, likely, employ keener vision
Funding hydro and nuclear fission.
(The molten salt kind,
For our peace of mind)
With CME-proofed grids of transmission.
Electricity, for the third world poor
Will unlock the virtual door…
To an affluent life,
A job and a wife
With less children than folks raised before.
So, curtailing overpopulation
Is not about “limiting nations
On what they can do
Which emits CO2”…
It relies on industrialization!
Pop Piasa —
Speaking as a fellow poet — what’s not to like. Highly readable and amusing. Great rhyme and rhythm. Coherent and accurate throughout.
Eugene WR Gallun
Thanks, Mr. Gallun. I really enjoy your pennings of poetry also. You compliment was exceedingly generous.
I liked your poem it gave my a nice chuckle. The sad part is that it is all true.
Pop , excellent and thanks. ( can I refer it? ).
I hereby give it to the public domain. My gain is intrinsic. I wish I could think of a tune that doesn’t sound like “Mr. Rogers” wrote it.
Better yet, does anybody have contacts with Sen. Inhofe? Send it.
USGS = United States Geological Service. Why are they counting dead bird? Are they familiar with the definition of “rock” or has that slipped their tiny minds? Perhaps a report authored by a more appropriate agency – such as the EPA – would have produced a much more unpleasantl reaction.
A movie plot.
Come to think of it — here is a plot for a movie — Terrorist take over the facility and use the array to burn planes and missiles out of the sky and incinerates troops on the ground. The solution? The sky is seeded to create a stormy cloudy day and the troops are sent in. To add tension before the end, the sky begins to clear. Hollywood hear my cry!!!!
Eugene WR Gallun
Shucks, it needs “special effects” to operate profitably now.
If they had waited another year or two to do this study, the mortality rate would, no doubt, have been better.
probono —
You mean fewer birds left to kill so the kill numbers look better? The desert does not replenish itself quickly.
Eugene WR Gallun
but then again, you can’t really prove the efficacy of your mitigation efforts without a baseline study, now can you?
Can anyone comment on the effect on birds due to the heat bloom that must be created above the tower given the high temps being generated?
dryscottdalegmailcom August 3, 2016 at 4:26 pm mentions “the hot solar towers were generating thermals which became dust devils and mild tornadoes dropping sand back on to the mirrors.” as one effect but is there any effect to birds in transiting through far hotter than normal air temperatures?
Driving along the freeway beside the facility when it’s going full bore, you can feel the radiant heat, even with windows up and air con going.
I remember using log tables at school. Now it’s hey Siri what’s the square root of…. etc
Oh, but cats…
The Greens still drag out references to the Exxon Valdez incident, which like other unfortunate occurrences, happened only once. Ivanpah and similar installations just keep on killing.
Then there are the tens of thousands of wind generators all over the place.
The video is impressive, but I’ll have to pass on the product. I can get a cheaper bug zapper at Walmart. 🙂
This is sick.
But this problem has been resolved, surely?
why is this site still banging on about it?
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/16/one-weird-trick-prevents-bird-deaths-solar-towers/
…OMG…Thanks for the laugh !!…Wait, what…you were serious ?? OMFG !!
Really? You really think that birds were only being killed when the system was in the “standby” configuration? You really think that the birds can only be killed/injured at the exact focal point of all the mirrors? So it’s completely safe when in the “production” configuration? Even you can’t be that stupid.
….Oooooh yes he can !!!
If this were in Kentucky…..
Dreadful situation as with the bird munching wind turbines. “Environmentalism”sucks.
Outside of Altamont Pass and similar old designed turbines, I dispute that there is any problem with wind turbines, where any planning consideration has been given to birds.
In the UK there are not thousands or even hundreds of bird deaths.
True. More like tens of thousands of bird kills.
On this video, if it is smoking and falling, it can hardly be an insect. An insect would not have enough mass to fall like that, so all these falling smokers must be the size of birds.
One thing is the birds, but all that poor insects shall die breaks my heart.
To be fair it has to be compared to the death rate of 7500 people who annually dies of particulates from coal-fired power plants. http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/
The IQ reduction from mercury comes in addition.
/Jan
“To be fair it has to be compared to the death rate of 7500 people who annually dies of particulates from coal-fired power plants.”
To actually be FAIR about any risk factor you have to be HONEST about comparing ALL of the risk factors involved. Say that one in a million (I’m guessing, I couldn’t find a number) die from an allergic reaction to whooping cough vaccine compared to about 10,000 in a million who will die if they contract whooping cough.
Tell me that you would apply your coal death “logic” when faced with vaccinating your child against whooping cough?
And when would these 7500 people have died without coal? An hour later? A year later? Or … 20 to 40 years SOONER? In fact the use of coal to produce electricity for the masses has profoundly increased life expectancy but you would rather to live in your fantasy world pretending that that fact is somehow irrelevant to the discussion. It is not, you are wrong, fossil fuel is the best thing that ever happened to human civilization and you will be unable to scratch the surface of the benefits with your silly “7500 people died” claim.
To prove that point consider this http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/weather/11382808/Winter-death-toll-to-exceed-40000.html
Why are more pensioners dying in the winter? Point blank, it is because of people like you who are increasing the cost of energy. For many elderly on a fixed income your “green” policies have increased energy cost to the point that some now have the choice whether to eat or keep warm. Your “ideas” about “saving” 7500 people are killing MILLIONS of poor people around the world as well as bringing many more people closer to poverty.
Face it – your hoax is killing people.
To further illustrate just how specious your 7500 claim is consider that Drax power station is now burning wood pellets instead of coal. How’s THAT working out in terms of particulate emissions hmmm?
Wood is as bad or WORSE than coal. http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Biomass-Air-Pollution-Briefing.pdf
And your silly ideas are decimating forest land, eliminating the very natural resource that you people claim to be so concerned about – trees.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2581887/The-bonfire-insanity-Woodland-shipped-3-800-miles-burned-Drax-power-station-It-belches-CO2-coal-huge-cost-YOU-pay-cleaner-greener-Britain.html
100 stars…..
Firstly, why do you think the people who die of particulates would die soon anyway? Most of the deaths from particulates are lung cancer, and that usually robs several decades from a person’s lifespan.
Moreover, most the IQ reduction caused by mercury comes from the poisoning of the unborn children in the mother’s womb, and affect a person though the entire life.
You seems to think I am an extreme environmentalist, but I am not. I agree in most of your arguments. Power production, industrialism and modern life is good. I think people who hates all this have hijacked the label environmentalism. I agree that in some cases the environmentalism costs many lives. The resistance to the use of golden rice is just one example.
However, you do not need to be an idiot to think that we should work for de-carbonizing the power production in the end. France did so thirty years ago and it works very well. They use nuclear and I think that is a great choice, just as good as any other non-polluting sources.
This article was about the environmental costs of solar power and I think it is fair to compare it to the negative effects of the most polluting power source we still use.
/Jan
Yes, and the clear cutting in U.S. forest lands to ship wood pellets to the UK boilers makes about as much sense as the marketed hype of imported Icelandic water to the U.S. during the peak of the bottled water marketing era.
Jan why do we have to de-carbonize our power generation? The additional CO2 we get from cheap fossil fueled power generation is improving farm yields and the inexpensive generated power is improving our lives. What more can you want?
Matt,
as you know many people around believe that the elevated CO2 level leads to ocean acidification, rising temperatures, melting glaciers and rising oceans. And they are of course right, the debate is about how much the oceans acidify, how much the temperatures rise and how much the glaciers melt and the oceans rise.
It is about whether it is negligible or cause real damage right now. Only the most uninformed deny that CO2 is a climate gas and that CO2 dissolved in water reduce the PH Level.
Anyway, I think the most worrying thing is that the CO2 level continues to rise by 2 ppm annually. We are now at 400 ppm, the highest level in approximately 800 000 years and it continues to rise.
India may copy Chinas economic success in the next decades and may add just as much carbon to the atmosphere as China do now. This means that eventually the CO2 level will be so high that it causes real concern.
Therefore, we should start to de-carbonize now.
/Jan
Sorry you are wrong. I have kept both reef and tropical fish tanks and there is no amount of CO2 we could produce by burning all of the known fossil fuels could effect the ocean enough to matter. Do a little reading about buffering and how it effects the ocean.
Jan Kjetil Andersen:
* ocean “acidification” – CO2 has been much higher in earth’s past – back when many ocean creatures were evolving. If ocean pH is anything today it is too alkaline, reduction of ocean alkalinity reduces stress on most ocean organisms. The added CO2 also benefits aquatic plant life. 60 MYA ocean pH was ~7.5 and CO2 was ~1000 … we didn’t do that!
* rising temperatures – compared to the last 500 million years earth’s temperature is about ~6 degrees below average. There also appears to be a hard limit to global temperature, about 15 degrees higher than present. (I suspect that water vapor plays some yet unknown dramatic role in that.) And where do most of earth’s species live? In hot humid rain forests or on top of ice caps?
* melting glaciers – So what? Forests will grow in their place just like they did before.
* rising oceans – If any aspect of alarmism can be labeled as an irrational fear – it is sea level rise. Sea level has been rising for hundreds of years coming out of the LIA. It is not accelerating because snow fall has increased at high altitudes such as on Greenland and Antarctica. There is simply no threat! After the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 they raised the entire city 17 feet. 2/3 of Boston didn’t exist 300 years ago – it’s all fill taken from Beacon Hill and Needham. We’re talking under 4mm per year, do you realize how slow that is? The cure for sea level rise is not depriving the third world from exploiting their resources to become economically independent the way we exploited ours – the cure is a building code.
* “CO2 level will be so high that it causes real concern” Gee, maybe when it hits 1000 (what most plants really like) and deserts are swamp land again we’ll look back and wonder what people were so “really” concerned about?
The only thing I fear is what happens to humanity when (if?) we start slipping back into another ice age. Then you really will see mass migrations – heading toward the equator. IMO, if burning FF could possibly introduce enough CO2 to prevent another ice age – that is what we actually should be doing to insure our future, not quibbling over immensely exaggerated alarmist talking points.
Matt says:
In all due respect, Matt, this is nonsense. If it were that easy to falsify the theory of ocean acidification, we would not have a debate about it. I am only saying what most of the scientific community says. You have select your reading carefully to find support for the claim that there is no reason at all to worry about ocean acidification.
/Jan
I am basing my position on 30 years of experimentation on how to grow coral in an ocean environment. Your statement shows that you do not even have a basic understanding of how CO2 is essential to the formation of coral and it’s ability to use calcium to form itself. Please do a little more reading on the processes needed to form coral in the ocean environment. In my fresh water tank the PH varies between 7.6 at night to 6.5 during the day with the lights on as I add CO2 to the tank for plant growth. The tank goes through this every day and all of the tanks inhabitants including shellfish and snails are healthy and growing well. I remove approximately 2lbs of excess plant material from the tank every week to keep the growth under control.
Mike
The life forms that lived 50 million years ago were used to a level of 1000 ppm. The life forms we have now have for the last 800 000 years lived with a CO2 level below 300 ppm, and we are now more than 30% above that, and the level is increasing rapidly.
In my view, you only need some common sense to realize that this is a highly disturbing development.
/Jan
We are not increasing the amount of CO2 by any great amount. CO2 is a trace gas that is o.o4% of the atmosphere. In my lifetime the level has risen from 0.034% to 0.04%. While this may be a 30% increase it shows that a 30% increase in a trace gas means it is still a trace gas. Greenhouses still increase the CO2 level to promote plant growth this shows us that most plants in the world would like the higher CO2 levels and the over 8% increase in plant growth worldwide since we added CO2 to the atmosphere is the proof
Matt,
Thank you for sharing some of your insights from your experimentation in growing corals. It was very interesting to hear about your fresh water tank.
Do you add similar amounts of CO2 in your seawater tank, and how is eventually the PH reaction there?
/Jan
Billion Dollar bug and bird zapper
For every bird counted as “smoking” or falling near the facility there could be 100’s to 1000’s that may not appear to have suffered any noticeable injury – but are nonetheless compromised by damage to their flight feathers and or eyesight.
They will die too maybe a day or two later miles from the facility and not be counted. They will be on the ground unable to fly because they are out of energy due to the extra effort of flying and or not being able to spot food having been partially blinded.
A lot more serious investigation needs to be done to assess the true death toll brought by lesser injuries. (For example a scorched flight feather investigation would seem possible by trailing some feathers behind an R/C airplane flown at various trajectories through the light field that are far enough away from the center to preclude burning but yet hot enough to cause deformation. )
The only abundant natural substance that reflects the sky over a large area is WATER. That is what these birds believe they are seeing from many miles away exactly where their ancestors actually did see water a long time ago – it’s a LAKE BED. So they are coming there for the water. Water guarantees that other life will be there including whatever these birds eat.
http://image.sbsun.com/storyimage/LG/20141118/NEWS/141119357/EP/1/1/EP-141119357.jpg&maxh=400&maxw=667
Mark Jacobson, the Stanford prof with all the 100% WWS (wind, water, solar) plans calls for 387 consentrated solar power plants for the state of … New York:
http://www.theenergycollective.com/ed-dodge/301031/critique-100-renewable-energy-new-york-plan
NY just went with the nuclear option.
And they can use all the trees they cut down to power NYC! … for a few days.
What a mess.
It might bring attention if some snail darters were catapulted into the flux. And since they are just relying on video, why not catapult some stuffed animals also, like maybe polar bears, grey wolves, grizzlies, Florida alligators and other protected species.
Yeah, they’ll take draconian measures to protect a tiny sub species of smelt that is already functionally extinct anyway yet turn a blind eye to protected species like eagles being slaughtered by wind turbines.
These are the serial Alphabet murders.
Fewer than 15 “dont matter” birds died during 8% of the year. What % of the operational time I wonder ?