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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I use use my old slide rule on the sailboat by hanging it from the rigging to scare away sh*t spreading flying vermin.
I think it would also come in handy to smack bird whiner up side the head. I know idiots that make up silly reasons to be against something have something in common. All are idiots who have never producing something.
Engineering is a collaborative effort. Life is an open book test. Perfect is the enemy of good. Models have to be verified. Does the design work as intended?
I had the second HP 35 on campus. My sister worked at HP.
Chernobyl was a collaborative engineering effort and it worked as intended too … for a while.
Don’t you mean… Until they purposely bypassed the safety systems causing the plant to blow up.
Matt – “Don’t you mean… Until they purposely bypassed the safety systems” Well yeah, it seems that they all had tunnel vision manually pulling out the control rods trying to jockey the reactor power back up because they were determined to salvage a damn test that could have just as well been abandoned and tried again later.
“SOLAR POWER: Desert plant has pollution problem
The Ivanpah solar plant burns substantial amounts of natural gas, making it a greenhouse emitter under state law.”
http://www.pe.com/articles/plant-783703-gas-energy.html
Andrew
If they ban fracking, what will they use? Instead of being gas plants, as Robert Kennedy Jr has said, they might have to become diesel plants.
Industrial scale examples of failed energy policies litter the landscape and define another form of blight. But wait, that will only lead to a grant program of blight recovery with some of the same questionable policies, insiders, and contracting as before. It would be better to relabel them ACA service centers and tout their job creation.
remember the snail darter
what a difference
continental finds and reports one bird and gets fined
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903791504576588642920063046
Continental Resources is accused of violating the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act because “on or about May 6, 2011 in the District of North Dakota” the company “did take [kill] one Say’s Phoebe,” of the tyrant flycatcher bird family.
Has anyone notified Audubon Society? I see nothing about this at their website.
They are part of the arrangement and sacrifices have to made.
I believe we’ve found our new missile defense system. Workers were seen running around at lunch time under the tower catching the larger birds for a free roasted lunch
I think it’s time for a continuous live feed.
And one with a bird’s eye view. (Sorry … couldn’t stop myself.)
A fellah was just fined and jailed for killing one migratory bird here in Alaska.
Double standards make me wanna puke!
My wife and I were driving up Interstate 15 between El Lay and Lost Wages last year and we saw this surreal solar collector. It is bizarre. This is what is burning insects, the birds that need them for food, etc., etc., all up and down the food chain. And the neatest thing of all is that right there on the freeway is an exit sign for SEARCHLIGHT. That is where Senator Harry Reid comes from. It was just weird.
As a side note, I have my old K&E from my days at MIT from 1959-64. I love WATTSUPWITHTHAT.
As far as I know K&E were the only ones to make a slide rule that was laterally flexible, so you pinch it with your fingers on the back of it to crack open the channel for easy slipping, and very precise positioning, and then let it snap back to the firm non slip position.
The cheap plastic slide rules were a royal pain to use, as the slider either fell out or you couldn’t move it at all.
G
george e. smith
Pickett made a aluminum version called the Texas Speed Rule for the slide rule competitors in the Texas High Schools in the 1950’s though the late 1980’s. (I competed in 1972-1974). The two fixed aluminum bars were flexible like you pointed out, and they were mounted with screws to adjust the position and the flex of the gap between the bars and the slide. To avoid the “”pain” of banging the slide back and forth through several hours of practice daily and the 30 minute weekend competitions, most fast users (the serious ones getting trophies and scholarships) rounded off the corners and tips with a file or grinder.
It didn’t have many scales, since most of the work was on the front side with the A, B, C, C1, D and D1 scales (squares, cubes, 4x, 6th, etc, square roots, cube roots, 4th’s etc being very common)
. The one sample test paper I have seen had 75 questions. It started with easy ones but got more and more difficult. I give below three samples:
1024-texas-01.gif (461 bytes)
1024-texas-02.gif (1251 bytes)
1024-texas-03.gif (2210 bytes)
from http://www.sliderules.info/collection/10inch/020/1024-texas.htm
The funny thing is, when a orbital solar plant with the energy transmitted by microwaves was proposed, it was the Greens that objected on the grounds that birds would be incinerated. Guess the bribe asn’t big enough.
Yes, it is extortion. The green mafia only extort big companies, and this one is not big enough and it does not make money, it works with subsides. “Big green” only extort profitable companies, Green is not about the environment, it is about the money. Big oil has money, so they extort it.
Same happens with Volkswagen, it has money so they go after them. Thunderstorms produce the same chemicals as diesel cars, (ozone and nitrogen oxides) and in much higher quantities, but you cannot extort nature.
“The funny thing is, when a orbital solar plant with the energy transmitted by microwaves was proposed, it was the Greens that objected on the grounds that birds would be incinerated.”
No birds would be harmed by the microwaves.
Where are the wildlife environmental groups on this Ivanpah horror? Where’s PETA?
Where is a Green or an Alarmist who will defend this slaughter?
Someone ought to ask these people publicly what they think about this destruction.
Any Greens or Alarmists reading this thread want to defend the destruction these solar powerplants and windmills cause? Would love to hear your justifications for why millions of birds and other creatures are being killed annually in order to supply us with electricity, when there are better alternatives available, that don’t kill wildlife wholesale.
It’s not “tens of thousands” of birds being killed, it is “millions” of birds being killed annually, with more to come in the future if we do not change direction and get our energy from somewhere else.
The Greens and Alarmists cannot defend this practice. That’s why you won’t hear a peep out of them on this topic.
show me some figures on wind turbine bird kills… it clearly isn’t the level of eagle deaths alleged, because I checked and at the rate given the eagles population of the US has been already wiped out, several times…
Here are a couple of links, Griff.
http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/new/us-windfarms-kill-10-20-times-more-than-previously-thought.html
http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds
I posted a link to an article here on WUWT a few weeks ago claiming over 700,000 bird deaths by windmill. I can’t seem to find it now.
I thought it a little strange when I went to the Birdwatchers.co website and did a search on windmills and got nothing. I guess they don’t connect windmills with birds.
The “love affair” with windmills should be over. They are unnecessarily harming the Earth’s wildlife.
[In their defense, no bird has more than a very short, fleetingly small contact with a windmill. In fact, in the latest survey, 97% of all government birds who responded said they never had contact any contact with a windmill before. .mod]
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/proceeding/aipcp/10.1063/1.4949164
This paper reviews past and current avian mortality studies at concentrating solar power (CSP) plants and facilities including Solar One in California, the Solar Energy Development Center in Israel, Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California, Crescent Dunes in Nevada, and Gemasolar in Spain. Findings indicate that the leading causes of bird deaths at CSP plants are from collisions (primarily with reflective surfaces; i.e., heliostats) and singeing caused by concentrated solar flux. Safe irradiance levels for birds have been reported to range between 4 and 50 kW/m2. Above these levels, singeing and irreversible damage to the feathers can occur. Despite observations of large numbers of “streamers” in concentrated flux regions and reports that suggest these streamers indicate complete vaporization of birds, analyses in this paper show that complete vaporization of birds is highly improbable, and the observed streamers are likely due to insects flying into the concentrated flux. The levelized avian mortality rate during the first year of operation at Ivanpah was estimated to be 0.7 – 3.5 fatalities per GWh, which is less than the levelized avian mortality reported for fossil fuel plants but greater than that for nuclear and wind power plants. Mitigation measures include acoustic, visual, tactile, and chemosensory deterrents to keep birds away from the plant, and heliostat aiming strategies that reduce the solar flux during standby.
I knew it…..now, enviromentally-friendly solar power generation is no-longer enviromentally-friendly. So, now solar power joins coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear. I can wait to see how much it pollutes the air!
This proves beyond any doubt that environmentalism is only bullshit. Or at least insider trading. Whatever comes along next, it will be touted as environmental utopea, all of someone’s stocks in solar will be sold to buy as much as possible of the new creation. Just wait and watch.
Ivanpah is a weapon of mass destruction inspired by Archimedes and Tesla Death Rays. The two archetypes of mad scientists. Ivanpah builders hear voices in their head – burn birds burn!!
Griff, here’s the link I was trying to find on bird deaths
http://www.birdwatchingdaily.com/blog/2013/07/17/new-study-estimates-573000-birds-died-at-wind-farms-last-year/
When I saw this headline a few months ago, I was shocked. I had no idea the bird deaths were of this magnitude. Before I read that article, my only problems with windmills were that they were a blight on the landscape and were too expensive compared to other generating methods.
But after reading that news, I am totally against windmills. I think new ones should be banned and those already built should be torn down.
I don’t think many people in the world realize what these windmills are doing to our wildlife. I think, they, like me, would be outraged at the numbers of deaths these machines are causing.
If the people were made aware of this horror, I don’t think windmills would have a chance of going forward. Such a stupid tragedy. These guys thought they were so smart, and look at what they have done.
Time for a new direction. Time for people to wake up and see what is really going on around them. Their leaders are leading them astray.
I’m stunning about all these strange comments on bird deaths primarily focussing on wind turbines and – through this post – even attacking a solar farm. Wow!
Of course: animal death caused by humans never is a good thing (think for example of what we daily eat, veg(etari)ans of course excepted.
But concerning birds, here is a chart showing their killing’s major causes in the USA and in Canada, found on a french site but manifestly originating from Northern America:
http://www.consostatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/mort-oiseaux-usa-2014.jpg
Maybe we all think a bit about that?
I found the chart’s origin:
http://www.stateofthebirds.org/2014/2014%20SotB_FINAL_low-res.pdf
in page 6 of 9.
(USA)
234K birds/ ~50K wind turbines = 4.68 per wind turbine (sounds awfully low to me)
200M birds / 260M vehicles = 0.77 per vehicle (sounds kinda high, I collided with one goldfinch 10 years ago)
The report is from Cornell funded by http://www.nabci-us.org whose committee memberships include the National Audubon Society (who is thoroughly in the bag for CAGW given their silence on biofuel deforestation) as well as several politically motivated government bureaucracies/depts.
National Audubon: “Audubon’s Birds and Climate Change Report, published in September 2014, confirmed that climate change is the single greatest threat to North American birds. Seven years in the making, the report warns that 314 North American bird species could lose more than half of their current ranges by 2080 due to rising temperatures. ”
If coal had never been mined we would still be burning wood and US forests would have NEVER recovered! Then how many birds species would have been lost?
The Original Mike M on August 7, 2016 at 6:16 am
234K birds/ ~50K wind turbines = 4.68 per wind turbine (sounds awfully low to me)
sounds kinda high, I collided with one goldfinch 10 years ago
Typical language here, whatever the thread is about: this is a skeptics site, and it shows.
Frenchies love to say « Le sceptique doute de tout et donc ne se doute de rien. »
If you can’t manage to understand, Google’s trad helps.
France’s EPA (a land dominated ad nauseam by the nuclear industry) informs us that in Europe, the bird mortality rate per turbine/year is between 0.4 and 1.2…
And I tell you that we lose every year about five joung birds due to the extreme reflection of today’s windows, they die while thinking they’re flying in the landscape.
If coal had never been mined…
Nobody’s talking about coal here. Why do you?
Please keep on visible facts, Original…
How many insects and birds, do you think, die everywhere due to agricultural chemicals?
Why, do you think, is there exactly one number missing in the chart?
Bindidon August 7, 2016 at 4:57 am
1) So your argument would be that we shouldn’t try to find a cure for or even be concerned about the rare genetic disease that killed someone’s parents and threatens their children, simply because most humans die from other causes?
Because that is assuredly the claim you are making regarding birds. It’s some strange variety of the “tu quoque” argument, and it makes no sense. The fact that there are larger threats should never prevent us from being concerned about smaller threats, that’s magical thinking.
2) A number of these birds are endangered or highly protected. If I kill a golden eagle I GO TO JAIL. If a windfarm kills a dozen, it’s no big deal. In Canada, Syncrude had to pay $18,000 PER DUCK for killing plain old ducks … but then, they are an oil company and not a wind farm.
Given that court-established bird value, and your figures from your graph, that means that wind farms are killing $4.3 billion dollars worth of birds PER FREAKIN’ YEAR, and that’s throwing in the hundreds of thousands of bats for free… and you find it strange that folks are concerned?
3) A large part of the outrage is from the obvious hypocrisy of people who claim to be hard-core green nature lovers turning their heads away from the bird deaths. It appears that you have turned your head away from this aspect of the discussion as well …
4) Your graph is comparing apples and oranges. What you need to do is to look at the number of golden eagle and bat deaths caused by other power sources … for example, how many birds die per year from the nuclear power that many of the greens seem to hate?
Regards,
w.
Willis said: “A large part of the outrage is from the obvious hypocrisy of people who claim to be hard-core green nature lovers turning their heads away from the bird deaths. It appears that you have turned your head away from this aspect of the discussion as well …”
I’ve always thought that was a cheap straw man argument. To state that greenies are hypocrites because they don’t want to shut down this plant is to assume that they don’t understand the trade off and think it’s worth it. No form of large scale power generation is free of consequences. I understand this, and I don’t like birds being killed, but I also understand the consequences of our other power generation systems. To simply reduce the situation to “if they really cared about the environment they’d be against anything that harms birds” is to completely omit the reasons many greenies think the trade off is worth it.
Lol, just noticed this too:
“Given that court-established bird value, and your figures from your graph, that means that wind farms are killing $4.3 billion dollars worth of birds PER FREAKIN’ YEAR,”
The court didn’t establish that as the value of the bird. The value of the penalty isn’t the same thing as the value of the object. If I shoot your cow and the court fines me $20,000 for what i did, that doesn’t make your cow worth $20,000.
Willis Eschenbach on August 7, 2016 at 2:48 pm
Thanks Willis for your response: I always appreciate your reactions.
[0] I apologize for a sometimes poor english: german and french are my every day’s languages. Sometimes I check for correctness using… Google. { Focussing or focusing? }
[1,2,3] I understand your reaction, but I’m the wrong target for it. Please read my comment located just above yours. Do you really think I’m the person you suppose me to be?
– Would I care about a few birds dying every year at the house we rent just because the house’s owner replaced old windows by new ones causing in the sum, solely for Germany, the death of probably many 100,000’s of birds per year?
– Would I spend over 100 $ per year for bird nutrition during the winter, where really rare species regularly visit us?
It is evident that you’re right when you write:
The fact that there are larger threats should never prevent us from being concerned about smaller threats…
[4a] Apart from some illuminated persons, I don’t think that these greens hate nuclear power. They are rather afraid of all that waste produced during the plants’ lifetime, temporarily stored without treatment all around the world. (Especially in countries like Germany: we are here 80 millions living on 350,000 km².)
[4b] Let us, as you propose, come back to apples vs. apples, and restrict the comparison to the different kinds of electricity production.
You are partly right: a nuclear plant indeed causes, if we restrict examination to the plant’s reactor, certainly much less damage than a coal burning plant or a wind farm of equivalent power.
[4c] But nuclear plants inevitably and continually produce relevant quantities of tritium, a radioactive beta particle producer, which at high temperatures is so incredibly volatile that it even bypasses steel containers. This nice guy is suspected to be the origin of the elevated rate of child cancer around nearly all nuclear plants in Germany, but a proof is nearly impossible.
[4d] Nuclear plants are thermic plants like all those burning fossile stuff. You certainly know that for every produced GWhel, about 3.3 GWhth are generated aside, what requests cooling by towers of river water.
Do we know, Willis, how many birds and fishes suffer and die around each thermic plant, due to either cooling technique?
[4e] You certainly know that every installed GW of nuclear power consumes about 30 tons of 3.5%-enriched uranium. Each ton of that needs 6.5 tons of 0.7%-refined material, and again each ton of the latter needs extraction and refinement of about 2,000 tons of the bare mining stuff, together with incredible amounts of brute force chemicals and lots of water.
Thus one single 1 GW plant generates at mining place roughly spoken 400,000 tons of mining garbage plus chemicals plus water. All that is left on the ground in so called tailings – without any treatment.
How many animals (and humans) do sufffer from that over the long term, in your opinion?
[4f] And now we come, by analogy, to what in my opinion is the wind farms’ real bird killer: the engineering of wind turbines with permanent magnets based on neodyme and dysprosium, sold by China at dumping prices at the cost of immense environmental diseases!
Ooops! I forgot to insert the closing §…
So yes Willis, we can very well compare apples with apples, but we then have to consider their surrounding trees as well.
But all in all I prefer to consider them together with the oranges and the plums etc… That goes beyond a thread conveniently reducing the problem to energy sources, OK, but…
A little addendum:
[4e] You certainly know that every installed GW of nuclear power consumes about 30 tons of 3.5%-enriched uranium (per year).
So Bindidion, because deaths in traffic accidents are orders of magnitude more than those due to serial killers, in your opinion we should ignore serial killers?
This pseudonym I saw many times at WUWT. All the time in front of rather poor comments, just like this one, which I would even describe as simple-minded, sorry.
What about first reading Willis Eschenbach’s comment and my answer to it?
Bindidon August 9, 2016 at 1:45 pm
How about you leaving me out of it and just answering catweazle666’s question? I notice that with all of your fine and fancy footwork and misdirection, you dodged his question completely …
w.