Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
For reasons that will soon become evident, the comments on my previous wind turbine post reminded me of a long-ago sunset dinner with my gorgeous ex-fiancée on the verandah of a lovely treetop restaurant on Pohnpei island in the tropical Pacific.
The only “fly in the ointment”, as is often the case in the tropics, was … the flies. And various other tropical flying insects. So the treetop restaurant owners had thoughtfully installed one of those insect electrocution devices with the exposed power wires that go BZZZT every time another fly hits the wires, is electrocuted, and falls out of the sky.
In the lovely twilight, I thought little more about the occasional BZZZT! of the fly-killer until the owner of the restaurant said, “You should look over the edge of the verandah.”
We stood up, went to the edge, and looked down. And way down there on the ground, in the gathering darkness, was a group of very large tropical toads gazing straight upwards … and as we gazed down at their toadiness, BZZZT! went the fly-killer.
The freshly barbecued corpse of the fly fell straight downwards … but it never made it back to the earth …
I realized then that in nature nothing goes to waste. There’s always something waiting to consume any form of food, at times before it even hits the ground.
I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about the unexpectedly lethal habits of wind turbines. In the US, if someone kills a bald eagle they get slapped with a big fine … but wind turbines can kill the national bird, the Bald Eagle, by the dozens and absolutely nothing happens to them. They kill so many birds and bats that the US government has had to give them special exemption from all environmental rules and regulations about bird and bat deaths … and that’s a lot of deaths. It’s bizarre just how lethal wind turbines are.
So for example, it’s estimated that the wind farm at Altamont Pass in California not far from my home has killed 2,900 golden eagles in the quarter-century since it was built … and that’s just golden eagles. And estimates are that 600,000 bats are killed annually in the US alone.
I was thinking about my evening in the Pohnpei restaurant because someone said to me on Twitter “But … but … cats and tall buildings kill lots of birds, too” … and it’s a fact, they do.
However, there’s a huge difference with wind turbines, and I say that the difference, curiously, is bugs. Here is my theory as to why wind turbines kill so many bats and birds big and small, many more than anyone expected.
Wind turbines are surprisingly lethal because they kill bugs.
And not just a few bugs. Based on observations and model calculations, German researchers calculated that each wind turbine kills on the order of 12,000 insects per day, which is some 1,200 tonnes of dead insects per year in Germany alone. And for each bug that is killed, perhaps ten bugs are injured or dazed. Plus I suspect their calculations are too low.
First, a bit of background. Most folks don’t realize that the tips of those big slow-turning wind turbine blades are typically moving at 175 miles per hour (280 km/hr, an average of 21 different models), with some going as fast as 230 miles per hour (370 km/hr). YIKES! There’s no way to dodge something moving that fast.
It gets worse. At that speed, the blade tip doesn’t even have to hit an insect, bird, or bat to kill it or daze it. There is a near-vacuum on the back side of the blade. Just going suddenly from normal pressure to near-vacuum can cause a variety of injuries, including bursting the lungs of bats and birds.
So let’s follow the story, starting with the bugs. The turbine is acting like a giant bug-mincer. It is smashing bugs on the leading edges of the blades, just like the smashed bugs you get when you drive down the highway. It is injuring bugs through both turbulence and pressure changes. And it is constantly and invisibly spinning hundreds of both dead and wounded bugs, and lots of smelly bug-juice from the smashed insects, up into the sky.
What happens first, of course, is that the smell of the dead and wounded insects attract lots of other insects. Many insects are scavengers, and so more insects come to feed on the dead insects just like flies drawn to sh … well, you get the idea. So in addition to the bugs killed and wounded, we have all of the other very live bugs eating on them, and flying around between meals.
And of course some of these new bugs that came to feast on the dead get killed or injured as well, it’s a self-reinforcing insect death trap.
Now, remember what I said about the frogs eating the flies “before they hit the ground”? What happens next is that large numbers of both bats and insectivorous birds are drawn by the smell of thousands of dead and wounded insects. They do their very best to eat the dead and wounded insects before they hit the ground.
And when you mix large numbers of bats and insectivorous birds on the hunt, somewhat oblivious to their surroundings in pursuit of insect prey, with turbine blade tips going 230 miles an hour, that’s 370 km/hr, the outcome is unavoidable—large numbers of dead and wounded bats and birds.
Of course, wherever you have large numbers of dead and wounded bats and birds, you’ll inevitably attract numbers of the large predatory or scavenging birds such as owls, buzzards, vultures, falcons, eagles, kites, buteos, accipiters, and harriers. They come in to eat the living, wounded, or dead birds and bats that came in to eat the living, wounded, or dead bugs … and of course, since these large predators too are on the hunt and somewhat oblivious to their surroundings, when you mix in the high-speed turbine blades the raptors suffer the same fate as the smaller birds, the bats, and the thousands of bugs. Killed and wounded in hundreds and thousands.
How many birds die this way? The simple answer is … too many. But it’s hard to tell because the wind industry folks consider that a trade secret, and they won’t reveal their figures. The Audubon Society says:
Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America.
Hundreds of thousands … however, this is just a guess, and the guesses keep getting revised upwards. In Hawaii, one of the few places where they’re legally required to measure the losses, I find articles like this one from 2017, “Wind farms killing more bats than expected“, or this one, “Hawaii windmills take a toll on endangered animals“
Right … I bet they are killing more than expected … bugs.
Me, I say that the reason people continually underestimate the number of birds and bats killed by wind turbines is that they never thought about the bugs. They think that a random bat or bird will only intersect with a turbine blade every once in a while as it flies through the landscape, so not many will die … they don’t realize that instead, the bats and birds are attracted to the turbines by an unending supply of easy insect prey. Those birds and bats, in turn, are preyed upon by raptors of all types … and all of them are chasing one of many dead or injured insects, birds, or bats through the lethal turbinespace, with the tragically predictable outcome.
Anyhow, that’s my own theory of why wind turbines kill so many birds and bats—because of bugs. Go figure. As always, YMMV.
Here, I’ve been packing. I’m leaving tomorrow for a couple-week vacation in the Nevada desert, so I’ll be out of touch with you good folks for a bit.
Sea fog is rolling back in, stay well,
w.
[UPDATE] As is often the case, science eventually catches up with WUWT. Here’s a scientific study from two years after this post, investigating the same question.
Time to start writing letters to congressman and the president, demanding that environmental justice is served.
Interesting, first thing I thought of was the recently outcry of the monarchs disappearing.
Here’s a butterfly counterpoint from a quick web search….
https://docs.wind-watch.org/butterflies.html
Simplistic hogwash.
Whoever wrote this is just making stuff up, and not being very smart of logical about it.
As we know from other scientists who actually went out and measured dead insects.
Dude, I can’t believe you are still harping on this. You are so far removed from any concept of reality. You are complaining about wind turbines killing 140,000 to 328,000 birds in North America each year.
Do you have any concept of total bird mortality?
In North America, total man-caused bird mortality ranges is nearly 4 BILLION BIRDS PER YEAR!!!
The no. one cause of bird mortality is windows on building. More than a billion birds per year.
No. 2 is feral cats – over half a billion birds per year.
Electric transmission lines – more than 130 million per year.
Wind turbines bird mortality rates do not even rise above the noise level, at less than 3 times ten to the minus six of the total annual bird mortality rate. You are a scientist, right? You know what those numbers mean.
USDA has done extensive research on total bird mortality due to human causes, and states that even the total of near 4 billion bird deaths each year “has no discernible impact on the stability of avian populations”.
Really, stop embarrassing yourselves.
“You are complaining about wind turbines killing 140,000 to 328,000 birds in North America each year.”
And bats, which control insect populations.
A high proportion of raptors (endangered species).
Both undercounted.
Cat-carnage overcomunted.
Read the comments.
Duane,
The actual number of birds and bats killed by turbines of death is a million at a minimum, with a disproportionate number of endangered raptors.
But it’s probably an order of magnitude more than that. Other sources of bird and bat mortality preferentially kill species capable of rapid population increase.
Even if it were a million birds per year – a number supported or claimed by any credible avian authority in the world, since you just made it up – is still vastly below the noise level in total bird mortality .. 0.03%. “Noise level” is anything in fractions of a percent by any rational measure.
Again, USDA researched and published papers that show that even the full human caused annual bird mortality causes no discernable impacts on avian populations.
You’re embarrassing yourselves.
Not to mention, pretending to be green defenders on this one subject, when of course the anti-renewable folks are all anti-environtalism all the time. Just reading the posts and typical commentary here at WUWT is proof positive of the anti-green mindset.
So stop shedding all those silly crocodile tears over poor dead birds. Nobody believes you.
Not many eagles, hawks, falcons, and bats are killed by running into windows of buildings. Yet a *lot* of them are killed by wind turbines!
And wind turbines have a huge impact on these species regardless of what the total bird deaths might be. You’ve just used the argumentative fallacy of Lying with Statistics. The issue isn’t the total number of birds killed. It is the total number of predator birds that are killed.
State your numbers? Your data sources?
Raptors ARE a subset of total avians killed by wind turbines. Whatever proportion big birds are, it is STILL virtually unmeasurable.
Every single ranking of the human-induced causes of avian mortality does not even include a line item for wind turbines because it is so tiny as to not even make the top 10 or 20 causes.
You are still lying with statistics! The issue isn’t total avian mortality. The issue is the mortality of the avian predator species. You cannot minimize the impact on these species by trying to include them with other species!
How about you state your data sources Duane?
In fact the people that have traditionally kept track of such things are now apologists for the windmill and solar industries.
The numbers would be more credible if the relative impact was compared.
The electrical grid has 120,000 miles of lines. If 130 million birds are being killed by electrical lines, that’s over 1000 per mile. If that were true, there would be 3 birds falling every day, per mile, of the electrical grid.
I guarantee you that this isn’t happening.
Now let’s look at cats. Let’s say there are 70 million stray cats in the US. If they’re indeed killing 500 million birds, that would be roughly 7 per cat per year. That seems believable, but we’re talking 70 million cats.
How many wind turbines are there in the US? 50,000? If they’re killing 140,000 to 328,000 birds per year, then each turbine is comparable to 1/2 to 7/8 of a cat.
As for buildings: there are maybe 120 million buildings in the US: homes, warehouses, factories and what not. If these buildings are killing a billion birds a year – each building is also equivalent to a bit more than a cat.
In fact, we should start using units of cats to measure bird mortality – actually stray cats so “scats”.
So, we’ve determined that each of the various non-wind turbine bird killers are various fractions of scats, with actual stray cats being a large number.
The buildings: we live, work and play in them. No getting around that.
The electric grid: the number is simply not credible.
The actual stray cats: zero benefit to nature or society. Agreed we should kill them all to save the birds.
Wind turbines: do we need them? Are the replaceable with less scat mortality tech? That’s the ultimate question.
Good approach re the power lines.
I first realized it must be bullshit the second I heard it and did some quick mental math. Then I checked. I know a lot of people who are linemen and who work in various industries associated with the power grid. Everyone I spoke to said the same thing…they have never seen a bird cause a short, and they would see it because it would have to be removed, it would sound like an explosion, and it would necessarily cause an outage.
In fact, it was pointed out to me and is easily confirmable that yes…power lines and distribution networks are carefully designed to make it very unlikely any sort of small animal could cause a short, and it takes a short to do any harm at all. Power lines overhead are uninsulated, except at the service entrance to a building. Birds and other animals like squirrels sit and walk on them all day, everywhere. It takes a potential difference to cause a flow of electrons, and so hot wires are never within even a foot of a ground or neutral or any path to earth that can conduct. Or else there would be arcing all over, every day, and when it rained, forget it.
The same is true of all the other numbers though.
Have you ever seen a bird hit a building? Or one lying on the ground after flying into one? Ever been in a house where a bird hit a window? Ever hit a bird with your car, or seen someone else do it, or heard someone say they hit one?
The answer to all of these for the majority of people is no or one or twice in a lifetime.
Just like the powerline bullshit which simple math can easily debunk because powerlines are not shorting out everywhere every day.
Cats were estimated based on a urban area with a dense accumulation of semiferal cats in a large city. Cats need a lot of food, and most of these feral communities of cats exist where they are being fed by people, otherwise the amount of range required for one small predatory mammal is well understood and characterized by biologists.
But what the people who made up the number of cats that are feral is, they projected out from that downtown feral community to the whole country. The US is 3.8 million square miles. There are places where thousands of people live per square mile…which is why we have 350 million people…a few densely packed urban areas. But these people calculated some 50 to 75 million feral cats! There are entire states where a feral cat would never survive even one year, even if it did not freeze to death…they are not adapted. But every square miles of mountains, rivers, lakes, prairie, corn fields, forests, Alaska, Texas, the deserts…every square mile has 25 feral cats, each catching birds every month. Even where there are no birds. A hidden army of ninja bird assassin cats, hiding behind every bush, unseen except for the occasional glimpse of one every now and then, and never in entire wide areas.
Even in Florida, with wildlife and insects and birds everywhere, there are feral cats sure, but few, and it is hard for them to survive, and they are not living on birds. Not one actual observational study has ever been done that characterized such numbers or such behavior. Not even with 350 million smart phone carrying you tubers on the lookout for anything noteworthy. open land has few cats. Even the feral ones live in close association with people in large population centers.
There is no New York City of feral cats. large areas have few or none, and some places have a few. Only cities can support several per square mile.
But when you find out where the numbers come from, it is just like most other warmista bullshit: made up. Nonsensical. Impossible. And endlessly repeated as if factual.
I have done the math and it took me a day to debunk beyond all doubt that every one of those numbers for cats, buildings, power lines, and cars are impossible, then looked up where the numbers came from, and found out they were all just made up one day, never confirmed, never even made a single observation…just a ridiculous projection.
Ever since, the numbers have been endlessly repeated as fact, exaggerated as time went by, and latched onto by some people as if they are incontrovertible.
It is literally made up from thin air to take attention away from what is an obvious and horrific ecological catastrophe in plain sight.
Being done wittingly and swept under the rug deliberately.
Trust me, there are no 70,000 wild cats in the US.
That would be 20 per square mile.
One for every 22 acres
On every acre of mountain, desert, prairie, forest (it takes miles of forest to support one predator), lake, river, grain field, road and bridge.
Since obviously huge areas are impossible for even a single cat to survive long (they would be prey in most places) the numbers for where they cat find a steady supply of meals would have to be several times that. There are feral cats in large numbers only in dense urban areas where people feed them. Otherwise a few here and there.
Even the number of house cats is exaggerated, wildly, as can be proven by just checking on pet food sales.
Sorry, top number should be 70,000,000.
That is the estimates by the people making up fake numbers of feral cats.
Because the numbers for cats and buildings are made up nonsense, not “research”.
You are embarrassing yourself by accepting the made up lies of people hired to be apologists for a corrupt industry.
Everything about the numbers for cats is made up…the number of cats, the number of birds they kill, all of it.
Made up from thin air by making ridiculous off the cuff projections.
The numbers for buildings are even worse…the logic goes from “sometimes a bird flies into a building” to “every building is hit by multiple birds every year”. Literally, that is the extent of the “research”.
If you do the math on the transmission lines, it is obvious that is bullshit too.
There are 3141 counties in the US. So just dividing those numbers up evenly, it comes to an assertion that every day in every single county in the country, 131 birds die from nesting in transformers of some such. For one thing, birds can sit on power lines and not be harmed…everyone can see it every day.
To be killed, they have to create an arc to ground. Because a direct short to ground will necessary trip the nearest breaker on a distribution line, this would require a service call to find the bird and remove it and reset the breaker.
I have a very good idea of how often something like this happens…very rarely. Most birds are far too small to contact a ground and a hot line simultaneously.
For safety and maintenance reasons, the entire power distribution network is carefully designed to make sure this rarely happens…but to believe these numbers, you have to think it happens literally everywhere, every day!
I was able to debunk this the first time I heard it within less than a day using actual information.
Look for the original source of this info…and you will find it is all made up.
The number for cars are simply estimates too. The same math shows that every driver in the US would have to be killing a bird or two every year. Everyone in the country who drives killing more than a bird a year.
Bullshit.
I have never hit a bird.
I hit a dog once that was sitting next to a state road and walking into the road 5″ in front of me going 45mph. Doggy suicide.
And almost no one I have ever talked to has ever hit a bird, or seen one hit.
Birds are a small fraction of road kill. It is mostly ground animals and mostly at night.
4 billion has no impact because it is a fake number, top to bottom…pure propaganda, and anyone who thinks for a minute and does some math can quickly realize it must be BS.
Besides for all of that, birds that fly into buildings are thought to usually be sick or in some other way unfit.
Birds caught by cats are not very common for the vast majority of cats, and the ones they catch are babies, or sick, or old. Those are the ones predators catch. Birds are alert, and fast. They do not come out at night, when cats have their big advantage. And they are smart and learn to avoid predators, and to watch for them.
And they are all small songbirds, which breed faster than rabbits. A songbird lays a clutch of 6 to 12 or more eggs several times a year, and for numbers to stay the same, exactly one has to survive to breeding age over the lifetime of every bird, two per pair. Songbirds can live for many years.
But the ones killed by turbines are large birds, migratory birds, birds of prey, and bats.
These birds have one or two young once a year, for the most part, and many are small in number to begin with.
Bats have few predators, living in hidden colonies, never coming near the ground for the most part and most bats, over the entire life. And they are far more important ecologically than most people realize.
Many of them only eat insects, and they eat a lot of them.
Likewise, just as the numbers for buildings and cats and electric lines are fake as hell, so are the ones for turbines.
You can go and find dead birds near turbines any time you go look.
Try going around to find the birds dead in power lines, on sidewalks, on car windshields, and in Fluffy’s jaws.
You are really a jackass sometimes.
Spanish wind farms kill between 6 and 18 million birds a year. The USA has twice as many windfarms as Spain. You do the math.
http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/releases/spanish-wind-farms-kill-6-to-18-million-birds-bats-a-year.html
The US likely has many more birds as well, to be killed.
Spain is largely a desert to semi-desert.
First, your numbers are based upon urban areas. The number of birds killed by windows on the Great Plains just don’t exist in the quantity you claim.
Second, your numbers of birds clearly are weighted toward urban types of birds such as song birds, thrushes, etc.
Third, the important part of the equation is the percentage of each population type of bird that is killed and their replacement rate. For example, blue birds have six to seven hatchlings twice a year. So each pair produces 12 new birds per year. Large raptors seldom have over two eggs once per year. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which species suffers most from predation by windmills.
Fourth, your numbers killed by windows is based upon birds in urban areas. There are few if any windmills and few if any large raptors in those locations so trying to compare them is like comparing apples to oranges.
Lastly, your numbers of cats has already been shown to be hogwash. Let me assure you that feral cats don’t live long in rural areas. Most people think farmers shoot them but that is not the case. Predation and starvation kills them. Make a list of predators to cats and you’ll be surprised. Foxes, coyotes, feral dogs, bobcats, snakes, and other cats make their lifespans pretty short.
The hogwash about numbers of cats was easy to track to it’s source.
It was one group who counted feral cats in an urban area with a colony of cats (they are only semi-feral…if you catch one while a kitten it will become domesticated to humans). So some people counted cats in this small urban area with a known huge number of cats living in an outdoor colony. It is known they only survive because a large number of people make a hobby of feeding them, every day. This is also well documented, but those people will not stop feeding them. They catch spay/neuter and release when they can, but it is difficult.
Then…and this is the incredible part…they projected the number they counted per square mile to the entire country! 20 per square mile they found in a inner city colony, times the 3.8 million square miles in the US (which includes mountains and water and empty fields and deserts and Alaska …).
And that is where it comes from.
And people like Duane, who is mostly a skeptic and claims to be knowledgeable, not only takes it for factual but insults people while repeating this nonsense.
So it is hardly surprising that people who have never calculated anything, or had an original skeptical thought, just buy it as fact.
And came to
The slaughter is further evidence of the consequences of the stampede of stupids.
Goat Guy – Please clarify.
What does “front” and “behind” mean here?
Are we talking speeds/pressures perpendicular to the plane of rotation (velocities parallel to wind direction as the array of blades faces, presumably, into the wind); or are we talking about speeds/pressures ahead-of or behind a segment of a blade as it rotates in a circle with velocity perpendicular to the wind? Perhaps components of both? If both, are your statements the same for
both?
Thanks – Bernie
Saying that “cats and tall buildings kill lots of birds too” is similar to what parents may hear from little Johnny: “But Tommy’s mom lets him do it!!”. When children try to justify evil by referring to other evil, it’s immaturity. When adults do it, it’s pure evil.
A few days ago I saw an unfamiliar talking head state, with the utmost certainty, that a mere .1 percent of human-caused bird deaths are due to wind turbines. The statement smelled fishy, so I did a brief search and found this article.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/21/wind-power-results-bird-deaths-overall/
The link to the source of the similar claim in the article does not work. The article makes the usual excuses: We don’t kill as much as x, y or z, as if those are legitimate excuses for killing.
There is a decline of bees in Europe….
There is an increase of “organic” farming in Europe…
While it’s an interesting theory, I believe the fact that the turbines are placed in the flyways of these birds has more to do with the deaths. The Casper wind plant is directly north of the North Platte river, where the eagles hunt. The eagles can easily be hit while simply flying to their hunting grounds. It was rumored turbines are put in the flyways of the endangered condors.
As for bats, the turbines are in their flight areas too—next to a river and thousands of bugs. Placement seems the most important factor, plus the number of turbines in the grouping. The 1000 turbine disaster going in on the no longer historic Overland Ranch should do a fine job of killing hundreds of raptors and other birds.
Drat—I used the dread “k” word again…..
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has a section on its website ‘Climate Change’. It has a picture of wind turbines and these words: “Climate change is the greatest long-term threat to wildlife and humans.”
https://www.rspb.org.uk/our-work/our-positions-and-casework/our-positions/climate-change/
Ya know, why doesn’t some environmentally responsible organization sue the Go’ment to stop the waivers that allow the wind turbines to kill endangered and protected species? Hel, they do it all the time to stop other things, like pipelines… Reinstating the legally required fines would go a LOOONG WAAAY to stopping all this BS.
I was reading about this recently.
The reason is because the large organizations that have for many years been the ones to do these things, have been bought off or are part and parcel of the whole warmista mafia.
Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Foundation (or is it fund?)…and the rest, they are all 100% down with the global warming alarum plan, hook line, and sinker.
It is shocking.
The reason is the same as the reason for the major scientific groups doing the same: They are controlled by a small core of people who are political in nature, not true conservationists or scientists anymore.
They are not in the least bit skeptical of these widely quoted numbers we see on this thread…few kills by turbines, many by other things like cats and buildings, and they are also on board with the entire “climate change” alarmist narrative.
In the old days, they would send people to stand by turbines and count, and get their own information.
But they just accept the numbers given by the apologists hired by the turbine operators.
Just like everything else involving hundreds of billions of dollars…too many people in positions to call out what is happening are instead part of the racket.
https://www.audubon.org/conservation/audubons-position-wind-power
They also accept without question the idea that these turbines are preventing global warming, which is of course for anyone allowed to attend their parties the only thing that really matters.
Even questioning one small part of any of it and you are branded a heretic and out of the club.
How can it be they ignore the facts which are plain as day for us here?
The Eagle has landed in aerie
on top of a windmill – that’s scary.
Doesn’t know she will die,
whacked right out of the sky
from rotating blades unawary.
The allowable yearly limit for killing bald eagles by wind turbines was upped from 1100 to 4200 on Jan 17 2017, still under the Obama administration. The allowable limit for golden eagles is still 0. If the bird-kill exceeds the allowance, heavy fines are imposed, but that is just the price of producing clean energy. in 2013 Duke energy paid a 1.9 million dollar fine for killing 14 golden eagles and 149 other protected birds.
The whole article: https://lenbilen.com/2019/04/12/what-is-more-precious-babies-eagles-or-fighting-climate-change/
Whenever I hear someone defend wind turbines because cats and buildings kill birds too, or hear of wind farms being exempted from the substantial fines levied against other industries when birds are killed, I am reminded of the government-appointed assassin in the movie ‘Serenity’, calmly explaining to his victim:
“This is a good death. There’s no shame in this […] We’re making a better world.”
Hey–you want MY list of who that could apply to??
Well, they BELIEVE. Terrifying.
There are a lot of bugs in the sky. This is a glider wing, after a four hour flight, covered in bugs.
And it can get so bad you need one of these – a de-bug.ger. It flies out along the wing, and is pulled back in with a thread.
http://www.dianasailplanes.com/Bugwipers_2B__1_.JPG
But they have never fitted one to a windelec (wind turbine), so they must have some really dirty wings (blades) out there…
Ralph
Dayumm!
Windmills are 18th century technology and a poor one even back then. Wind turbines require an enormous environmental footprint and basically disrupt the grid (the words of the Chinese govt after it lost its enthusiasm for all those turbines it errected). They are proving to be far more expensive than its proponents claimed. The most hilarious aspect is that wind proponents think the turbines are “advanced tech.” However, Don Quixote would feel right at home.
Willis you’re not going camping in the Lake that is Groomed, are you?
I have to admit I’d be very curious to read what you write about such an experience.
Willis, two additional things to consider.
1 Insects struck by the blade will often stick and foul the blade reducing efficiency and require cleaning. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11889978_Aerodynamics_-_Insects_can_halve_wind-turbine_power
2 Birds and bats struck and falling are prey for scavengers at the base. It’s well recognized in the literature that scavenging distorts counts of casualties. Years ago I read another study (haven’t been able to find it again) that discussed how these scavengers at the base of turbines could attract raptors which could cause more raptors to be sliced and diced by the turbines. A kind of synergistic predator prey relationship.
Mmmm… Willis, you may be on to something here.
If: (1) wind turbines kill lots of insects, (2) Germany has had wind turbines for longer than most other countries, (3) the “smoking gun” study that, so we’re told, “proves” that humans are extinguishing insect populations was done in Germany; does that not raise an interesting hypothesis to be tested?
Is there any correlation between prevalence of wind farms in an area and insect population decreases in that area?
While turbine blades differentially kill insects, they also kill their avian and mammalian predators.
The net could be more insects, which I have observed in my local AO, which has more bird and bat batterers per square mile than anywhere else on earth.
Wow, didn’t know about the insect aspect! An added factor is suggested by a youtube of a condor that flies through the blades, seems to like the experience and continues to loop back until struck down.
I think the “worse than thought” carnage is because the expected number of deaths is calculated as no of birds passing (once) through the circle of the blades multiplied by the percentage area of the circle occupied by blade times time. Clearly multiple passes of individuals eating insects and because flying through is fun for soaring birds racks up a much bigger score than the simple calculated expectation.
I haven’t read every comment above, but I wonder what the situation is with the offshore wind turbines?
You can’t see it, but behind the tip of each moving blade there is powerful vortex trailing off downwind that contains damaging velocity and pressure gradients to at least one blade length away.
Willis, you really are a national treasure.
“So for example, it’s estimated that the wind farm at Altamont Pass in California not far from my home has killed 2,900 golden eagles”
So you are saying that in a state with 30 or so nesting pairs, that you have liked all of them with one wind farm? And with a population size of some 25000 in the states, that you kill 10 % with one wind farm.
I’m skeptical.
This is a documented fact, easily searchable.
It is of course, nearly impossible to believe that it is true and has been ignored and allowed to continue, and is now being enlarged to the whole world, with a plan to cover the Earth with them.
But true it is, as is the plan and the current carnage, and that to come.
Do some looking. A quick search will instantly show you the grim facts.
These are not rumors, but documented facts.
That site could not have been planned and placed any better to kill Golden Eagles if it was designed to do only that.
So the next time I see a fox or coyote sitting patiently beneath a wind turbine, gazing expectantly up toward heaven, what am I to think?
That for every coyote, they tell us there are 150 cats?
Coyotes like cats for lunch. There won’t be any cats around a wind turbine.
The reason is feral cats are few and far between except in urban areas.
Many farms have a cat or a few of them.
But in open country fields, prairies?
No.
Owls, hawks and eagles prey on animals the size of a cat.
Obviously any large predator will hunt them too.
They are domesticated, and do not easily transition to life in the wilderness…at all.
Feral cats are common in cities, not too rare in suburbs, and very rare in rural areas.
They live near people for shelter and food.
Where no one feeds them they do very poorly.
But the main reason is why you do not see small animals, cats or anything else, running around like you see people in a city: It takes a certain amount of habitat to support a predator. 70,000,000 cats is over 20 per square mile.
Song birds weigh an ounce to four ounces and are mostly feathers. And they fly, are fast and alert. And are safe in their nest by sunset.
Raccoons do OK, because they will eat anything, can open trash cans and stuff, and are very adaptable. But even with them, it is obvious how much easier life is near people.
Near people, they are plentiful and fat.