From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
Even the greeniacs are starting to understand the damage to wildlife from wind turbines:
As wind power grows around the world, so does the threat turbines pose to wildlife. From simple fixes to high-tech solutions, researchers are finding ways to reduce the toll.
About twice a month, many of Australia’s wind farms receive an important visit from dogs and their handlers. The dogs are professionals and know exactly what they’re there for. Eagerly, they run along transects under the wind turbines, sniffing until they catch a scent, then lying down, sitting or freezing once they’ve located their targets: the carcasses of bats and birds that were killed by turbine collisions.
For nearly two decades, wind and wildlife ecologist Emma Bennett’s company, Elmoby Ecology, has been using canines to count the victims of wind turbines in southern Australia. The numbers are troubling. Each turbine yields four to six bird carcasses per year, part of an overall death toll from wind turbines that likely tops 10,000 annually for the whole of Australia (not including carcasses carried away by scavengers). Such deaths are in the hundreds of thousands in North America. Far worse are the numbers of dead bats: The dogs find between six and 20 of these per turbine annually, with tens of thousands believed to die each year in Australia. In North America, the number is close to a million.
In fact, some experts predict that turbine collisions could drive certain bat species to extinction. “It’s the No. 1 threat facing our small microbats,” Bennett says.
Numbers like these have caused strife in environmentalist circles, pitting those pushing for a rapid buildout of renewable energy — necessary to combat climate change — against those who oppose turbines due to their impact on wildlife; some bird conservation groups have frequently obstructed wind energy projects.
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The article asks how we can make wind turbines safer.
I would suggest we start by imposing punitive fines on any wind farms who do not take adequate precautions.
“”Wind turbines kill too many birds and bats. How can we make them safer?””
Dismantle them.
One way to promote equity is to force humans into flying EVs (see first few seconds of video).
There’s no need to completely dismantle them. Just remove the subsidy for their installation and allow them to only charge for the energy produced, and/or remove that portion which is responsible for the deaths…the blades!
AND only allow them to compete if they can guarantee continuity of supply
That might cause them to install their own battery back-up systems to “Guarantee Supply Capacity”. This would make them need to price themselves more in line with their actual costs and show them to be what we know them to be, A costly unnecessary eyesore
You don’t have to forbid them from competing, you only have to allow them to compete, and markets will take care of the rest.
Put them in a museum where they belong
Right next to the Tree Museum
Twice a month?
I doubt many carcasses sit around for 2 weeks in nature.
They must be vastly undercounting.
The article grossly understates the carnage caused by wind turbines.
This link shows bird mortality per turbine in various countries.
Spain: 333-1000 birds/bats per year
Germany: 309 birds per year.
Sweden: 895 birds per year.
https://windmillskill.com/blog/spanish-wind-farms-kill-6-18-million-birds-bats-year
At 4-6 birds per turbine per year, 10,000 equates to 1,700-2,500 total turbines. Is that all the turbines in Australia?
No. Although it’s very difficult to find total numbers of wind turbines in Australia without going through a list of all 94 arrays, I did find out that just the top 10 arrays had a total of 1,138 turbines. Those range from 75 to 167 turbines per site so if we assume that they get fewer as you go down the list, it still would come to far more than 2,500 turbines in total.
Just imagine how many bats and birds would be sliced and diced if Australia had 1 turbine per every 2MW of capacity demand including Electric Heating, Cooling, Cooking, Hot Water, and Transportation. Just current electricity demand would require 15,560 – 2MW generators spinning 24/7/365 to meet current demand. Once you actively electrify all FF sources (mentioned above) you will more than double that (31,000 – 2MW turbines). Then multiplying by (availability) Capacity Factor for wind of about 36% you would need almost 3 times that or almost 90,000 2MW turbines PLUS the battery capacity to hold the surplus generation until its needed…when the wind falls below 7mph
If Australia truly only has 2500 active turbines killing 10,000 birds, electrifying everything with wind would need 90,000 turbines would equate to 360,000 birds … If the initial count is correct.
Bats (certain) do a LOT of pollinating, eat a LOT of annoying insects.. and I think they’re cute!
TonyFromOz listed 101 wind farms on the east coast in 2021, with a total of 3500 turbines. Australia-wide, number of turbines estimated at arouinmd 4,000.
Matters little… ALL Countries have gone batty.
One study from a few years ago estimated they were being undercounted by about a factor of ten. This may fluctuate as the turbines massacre the local populations leading to higher initial figures, then dropping off as fewer and fewer of the local populations are around to be killed.
Many many years ago, I read an article that said “they” checked around one of the early turbines for birdkill daily and found none. (And yes, they were concerned that scavengers would drag the carcasses off — but they thought they’d probably find a few feathers and some blood sometimes if that happened.) But turbines were much smaller then and presumably the tips of the blades travelled proportionately slower. circumference = 2 * pi *r and all that.
Note that birds mostly manage to avoid being hit by cars. So presumably there is a vehilce/rotor speed below which flying creatures are pretty safe. If there is then the answer looks simple. And maybe it is. Simply limit the velocity of rotor tips to a speed acceptable to wildlife. Of course, that might make windpower uneconomic. Tough. Don’t blame me. Blame God/evolution for not making smarter birds and bats.
I remember that study. Didn’t they have to notify the operators that they were coming allowing the operators time to clean up the area before they arrived? I seem to remember something like that but, again, can’t remember all the details.
I’ve killed a few birds with my car, but the car is much slower and much lower than a wind turbine blade.
Mayabe it is that a moving vehicle is much more obvious than are rapidly rotating blades on a stationary structure.
The gold mining industry went through a similar evolution in Nevada, starting more than 30 years ago. The heap-leaching process, utilizing a cyanide solution, required collecting the cyanide solution, with gold, in what was called a pregnant pond. Ponds in the Nevada desert quickly became resting spots for ducks and geese, who died in alarming numbers. Enter a sequence of bird death avoidance measures, starting with playing loud rock music (Twisted Sister reportedly having some of the desired effect), transitioning to propane cannons, then to the actual solution, netting set up as a physical barrier. Try to imagine a giant windmill with a physical barrier keeping the birds, bats, and bugs out of the chopper. Isn’t going to happen.
Try removing the blades for bird safety…then install a group of stationary bicycles with chain drives attached to the blade axle and let the enviro-wackos pedal for the generation
And pedal for ‘generations’, until they are extinct.
There are designs where that is, to a large extent, the case.
“Each turbine yields four to six bird carcasses per year”
between six and 20 of these [bats] per turbine annually
using canines to count the victims
I’m sorry, but is this a joke? Even the green Grauniad ‘fesses up to much more ‘mortality’ than that :
“Hundreds of bats are being killed in collisions with wind turbines in the UK each month, despite ecological impact assessments predicting that many windfarms were unlikely to affect such animals, according to a new study. All UK species of bats are protected by law.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/07/wind-turbine-collisions-killing-hundreds-of-uk-bats-each-month-study-finds
Some ecologists are not happy
“Why is the public not more aware of this carnage? First, because the wind industry (with the shameful complicity of some ornithological organisations) has gone to great trouble to cover it up — to the extent of burying the corpses of victims. Second, because the ongoing obsession with climate change means that many environmentalists are turning a blind eye to the ecological costs of renewable energy. What they clearly don’t appreciate — for they know next to nothing about biology — is that most of the species they claim are threatened by ‘climate change’ have already survived 10 to 20 ice ages, and sea-level rises far more dramatic than any we have experienced in recent millennia or expect in the next few centuries. Climate change won’t drive those species to extinction; well-meaning environmentalists might.”
https://www.pbssocal.org/redefine/uk-ecologist-wind-farms-driving-birds-bats-to-extinction
Fair comment.
At my previous home in Nottinghamshire and thanks to an epic wood recycling operation about 400 metres away, I realised my house had a few mice installed within it.
(The smell of them, even from 10 metres away from their nests/runs/whatever makes my skin crawl and I get something not unlike asthma)
This has happened before and I know that boring ordinary mousetraps baited with chocolate spread are simply the best. Oversized plastic ones with hideous teeth/jaws.
So I set up some traps outside my house around the paths and sheltered under bricks and old roof tiles so that only mice or similar could get at them.
My limited number of mousetraps entirely disappeared.
Completely by accident I came upon one half jammed under the footings of my large wooden garden shed – it had been triggered but nothing immediately obvious had been caught.
I opened it up as you might reset it and inside, trapped by the big plastic jaws, were tiny fragments of fluff that could only have belonged a mouse.
It immediately dawned (there being a sweet-corn biomass field next door) that I also had a rat infestation. (Rats LOVE sweetcorn)
That Roland (rat) was waiting until Mickey (mouse) had caught in my trap then was dragging the whole lot away to ‘somewhere safe‘ to have a little feast of chocolate-filled mouse..
Isn’t Nature wonderful.
Now consider that bats are = flying mice.
And so how to make an assessment of ‘the damage’
I don’t know about rats, but mice when they go foraging, they leave a tiny trail of urine behind them.
For a mouse, the world is a very big place and by leaving a trail of their own scent, they can find their own way back home again.
Now, enter The Raptors.
They have learned that urine of almost all mammalian critters glows (fluoresces) under ultraviolet light and have evolved eyes that can see that florescence.
Hence in the UK, you see ‘Sparrow Hawks’ hovering (awkwardly) above ‘certain spots’ of fields, hedgerows and grass roadside verges.
They have seen the glow (created by solar UV) coming from the mouse/voles/shrew trails and know that if they hang around long enough will see ‘something moving’ down there
At which point they drop like a stone and munch it up.
Soooo, is it the urine trails (left by rats as they scout around clearing up dead bats) that are attracting the raptors?
And because they are watching the ground below, don’t see the turbine blades coming at them from above
And those scent sniffing dogs are not going to find the rats, especially as they tend to be nocturnal.
Look for their burrows = just like rabbits make but about half the size.
I forgot to say:
Get a camera that can see the fluorescent glow, that will tell how active the rats are and hence be some sort of proxy for numbers of dead bats.
I suspect that when the wind is up the tips of those blades are moving much faster than anything provided as previous evolutionary pressures. Therefore the blades cannot be seen as a threat by the raptors. As for bats. It was long ago determined that it is not collisions with the blades that are so deadly but the HUGE pressure pulses produced every time a blade passes in front of the phylons. Their little lungs are ripped out of they chests through their mouths by the sudden pressure difference. No doubt birds are not entirely immune either.
Confusing – so your solution is to cover wind turbine blades with chocolate spread?
Back in the 1970’s we had a mouse infestation in our flat (appartment, for our US readers) in Bristol. We used to bait the traps with Cadbury’s Chocolate Buttons, softened in the fingers and then moulded around the spike.
At first we were quite successful and bagged a fair few but then we started to find the traps un-sprung but with the bait missing. The pesky rodents must have worked out a way of removing the bait without springing the traps! Evolution in action, I suppose…
Some of the small rodents, ground squirrels, etc. must have a very ‘soft’ touch, as lots of times the bait (usually a raisin) is gone from our mouse traps (outer bldgs)., we don’t have a problem at the house (cat) Could even be a small bird??
I had mice after they were displaced from a nearby redevelopment- Tooting Mental Hospital
We got a mouser and she wiped them out in next to no time.
Nature is wonderful
Is your mouser still sane?
She has staff…
Chocolate is not a good bait for mousetraps, peanut butter is the top one.
As a Ag farmer/rancher for most of my life, I could write a book on rodent
control. Hantavirus is a real concern for my area as is rabies. Single catch
traps I use for the larger rodents such as pack rats and ground squirrels but
do have a few mouse size around outside of the house. Multi catch traps are my go-to
devices. Here are a couple of my favorite traps===>
https://www.farmshow.com/view_articles.php?a_id=317
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qk8W5uf-Dw
I have also battled ground squirrels for decades on some of my ground. Their dens
attract venomous snakes like rattlesnakes which can bite our grazing livestock
in the nose which is obviously not good. I finally got some long lasting control
after building a “gopher gasser” which uses carbon monoxide from a small
engine with a blower to kill them.
But favorite control method around the homestead is from attracting owls which
are amazing. I have noticed that over the years there was a noticeable decline
in owls after the building of wind towers in the area. I use a good number of trail cameras
and have recently seen some owls on one valley property this winter which is nice
to see..
My mother developed a problem with round tailed ground squirrels. They are cute but very destructive. My mom has a 50 year old pine tree in the back yard that was home to an owl and the problem only occurred after the owl vanished. Occasionally a coyote would come through the neighborhood but not often enough. Exterminators worked but they needed to come once a month and they didn’t get the ones on the neighboring property. A little over a year ago a family of hawks moved in an unfortunately the parents were electrocuted. The children survived and have pretty well cleaned up the neighborhood. Pretty good for a tree that was about 6 inches high when my mother received it and my father said would never survive.
We had a Great Horned Owl nest nearby and the she owl and her
offspring come to hunt around our homestead regularly. I maintain
a group of traps for the packrats and chipmunks that are a problem.
The traps are set in a wood box with a small opening to eliminate any
unintentional catches. The traps are modified with a large pressure
pad and the bait of peanut butter is smeared on the back of the box.
Any catch made during the summer gets put on a large piece of log
near the house below our bedroom window. This will always bring the
owl and her fresh hatchlings in during the night They make the oddest chirping/crunching sort of a sound while eating. I’ve been awaken to this
many a night.
She roost’s on the porch roof or over on the
shop roof with her off spring and hunt mice under the yard light. The owl poo stains on those areas are sizeable.. Late summer evenings after dark I’ve watched these fresh owlings hunt around the homestead many a night.
They migrate down the river during late fall to winter and
will return in late February and begin the mating season. The sounds
of owl hooting during that time will literally echo in the hills around us at night.
That also coincides with the migration of the snowshoe hares from the Spruce
thickets in the high country down to the willow bottoms along the river. This
in turn brings out an amazing amount of predators both winged and four
legged. I had a Gyrfalcon around the meadow for over a month last winter,
a very rare sighting. Last week on a different property I had a pair of Peregrine
falcons working on one pasture while a Marsh Hawk was in another. This
all starts with habitat management which is central to how I run my operations.
Too bad the enviro-greens don’t share the same view with their wind turbines.
Chocolate Mousse… the rat’s ass!
Is it really “well meaning” environmentisim or is it actually malignant politics?
I’d say it’s both
Gotta remember.
The people behind the wind turbine farce are “environmentalists”..
ie…. they don’t give a rat’s **** about the environment !!
Time for this one again:
Let’s try that again and click on the image icon and not [Post Comment]
But, but, there are no bat silhouette’s.
I suppose I could redo it with some bats. Maybe for Halloween and just in time for the election (-:
If you’re going to redo it with a few bats, maybe add a few blood streaks to the blades? 😎
Easily made safe, bring in bulldozers and knock them all down, of course do this after throwing all executives and politicians who pushed this environmental disaster on the people of the world into to prison for life and seizing ALL their ill-gotten gains.
..and dig out all the massive concrete and steel foundations!
Knocking down the towers are the easiest part.
Send the bill to all the climate proponents…including “science” journals and media. Fire all the causal regulators.
Vote out all the leaching legislators.
Have other dreams.
Lke full time, on demand electric service…and lower energy costs to consumers.
Light curtains. If a bird or bat breaks the light curtain, the blades stop.
Light curtains would likely demand more energy to run than the turbine generates at any given moment
They’ll stop spinning in 30 to 90 minutes depending on how fast they were spinning when the wind stops.
The braking systems are designed for too low or too high wind speeds only
There are two braking systems on the turbine; one is a disc brake in the hub, which “parks” the blades when there is insufficient wind (usually less than 7 mph); the other one is a set of aerodynamic “tip brakes” for each blade to help slow them down if a high wind shut down is needed.
How far distant would that have to be to allow the blades to come to a complete stop?
The blades do not stop immediately, do they?
Rather old hat:
https://www.britannica.com/science/law-of-inertia
Put them upside down : they will as efficient as ever.
Here’s a thought…..stop building these pariahs!
For years there’s been a concern about bird deaths caused by their flying into the exterior glass of commercial buildings.
I think I see where you’re going, here…
And globally how many panes of glass are there relative to the number of birds killed vs how many wind turbines relative to the number of birds killed
Hint, globally wind turbines number in the several hundred thousands
The Empire State Building has 6514 windows. (1 hi rise bldg)
New York City is estimated to have between 12m and 34m windows. (1 city)
Globally they will number in the trillions.
If Building windows were the same problem as Wind Turbines (re bird/bat mortality per unit), at 6 birds per year per turbine average, building windows would eliminate the entire bird population in a single year
Wind turbines are usually placed in good wind areas which are most often where birds and bats catch a lift with the air flow. If there are fewer birds and bats in the big cities then lets co-locate the wind turbines between the big buildings and kill one bird with one stone as it were.
Damn – one bird with two stones. I thought it was going a bit too well.
We have “stunned” birds, frequently, at our home.
One deterrent that works is to place a small item or two on the windows most likely to attract birds so they can see that it is not a through way. Suction cup hooks with a small item dangling from them work great on our sliding glass door in the den.
solid black hawk silhouette work well for many people and they don’t have to be more than life size, perhaps work well even when a bit smaller..
How do we make wind turbines safer?
Tear ’em down. Tear ’em all down.
Nothing that a large ring charge at the base would not cure.
On shore turbines were a problem so they started putting them off shore. Now that’s a problem to sea birds and whales and also financially a lost cause so they need to find another location. How about a California-style law that says you can build as many windmills as you like as long as they are off planet. Lots of space on Mars.
Not great prospects on Mars. Average wind speed is low, 1-4 m/s – less than operating speed and speed during storms is over 30 m/s – too high for them to operate.
Put them on satellites and get them to work in the solar wind instead?
Yeah, then Mars would be wobbling all over the place…
The bird and bat kill numbes are total BS
The actual kills are MUCH higher
I read a great scientific study on the subject years ago, which I can’t find now. Maybe there was a related article here
The windmills kill insects
Small birds and bats go foe the insects
Some small birds and bats get shredded
Big birds come to eat the small birds and bats
Some big birds get shredded
Carnivores come to eat the dead big birds
The counts are always too low because
evidence has been eaten by the next day.
In addition, some birds are injured and die a distance from the windmill where they would not be counted
Windmills should be banned just for bird and bat kills. Add whale kills.
They are also worthless for reliable power when it is needed. And their power output is highly unpredictable, which is bad for grid load balancing.
All windmills are a redundant waste of money
They could be repurposed.
Strap leftists to the blades and spin some sense into them. If that’s possible.
Having politicians pretending to be grid engineers is as dumb as having inmates at a lunatic asylum pretending to be doctors and doing operations.
A new reality tv show – strap leftist politicians to the blades, give a remote quick-release control to each contestant then the one that get’s ‘their’ politician the furthest wins a car! A petrol powered car.
Great idea, similar to the Dwarf Toss….
Strap impact-detonated explosives to the politician for maximum effect and audience enjoyment.
Many of your statements are based on a speculative essay by Willis.
Can anyone say ‘mosquito borne illnesses’?
So it really just ends with “any wind farms who do not take adequate precautions.” Without a single word on what those “adequate precautions” might be? Lame.
Windmills can also cause local warming, resulting in an inverted solution to the perceived problem.
Harvard Study Finds Wind Turbines Will Cause More Warming In Minnesota Than Emissions Reductions Would Avert (americanexperiment.org)
Minnesota can use some warming.
Take the useless bastards down, problem solved.
Suggest starting at the sum total of all subsidies received per “farm” facility, per carcass. Double for nationally or internationally recognized endangered species. Triple for sea life (since the article didn’t mention whales, dolphins, or other sea mammals).
Settling in lieu of the fine should be satisfied by removing ~20 MW (per facility, per carcass) nameplate capacity plus restoring the land or seascape to its former condition.
We are not in a climate crisis, CO2 is not the control knob for climate, we are not going to reach a tipping point and suffer irreversible global warming. Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators and remove all wind and solar from the grid.
Twice a month? That’s a lot of time for predators to find and dispose of many of the carcasses.
There’s also the issue of birds and bats that were not killed instantly, but managed to fly a few hundred yards before dying.
The Warmists say these numbers pale compared to the number of birds killed by cats and other predators and collisions with buildings, etc., and even those killed by “fossil fuel”…not sure how, maybe by colliding with oil derricks????…
One counter argument I have heard is that those birds are all small birds that reproduce by the millions and are in no danger of extinction; whereas, the wind turbines are placed in migratory bird corridors and kill the larger birds whose populations are dwindling quickly.
Any suggestions for other arguments to use in the discussions?
There are design that are much safer. One question of interest is whether they are all technically inferior are producing electricity per unit of wind or if there are various gatekeeper interests that assure these alternate designs don’t get fair trials.
Make them safer: limit blade diameter to 20 inches and move them into enclosures. In other words morph them into box fans………