The Shocking Solar Farm Bird Deaths the Mainstream Media Aren’t Telling You About

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Solar farms, coming soon to a field near you, are an ecological disaster turning productive land into a nature dead zone. Birds frequently fly into the panels mistaking them for water, while electrocution and incineration are common. Blanketing large areas once open to sunlight causes massive habitat disruption and reduced insect numbers. Like the heavily-shaded ground beneath the miles of often Chinese-made panels, all of this is hidden by a mainstream media and governing class that are desperate to keep the Net Zero kite flying high.

“Bird mortality has become an unintended consequence of renewable energy development,” notes Hannah Vander Zanden, an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Florida. Little work has been done specifically on bird mortality at solar farms, although it is known that millions of bats and large birds of every kind are killed every year by giant wind turbines and their associated high power electricity lines. In recent work in California, Vander Zanden found that the birds killed at solar farms were often non-local, with peak kills during migratory periods in April and September. Britain, of course, is a haven for many migratory birds, large and small.

In 2023, the US Association of Avian Veterinarians published a “Conservation Note” titled ‘Solar Energy Production’s Toll on Wild Birds‘. It reported the estimate from the US Fish and Wildlife Services  that yearly avian mortalities due to electrocution averaged 5.6 million and that some eight to 50 million bird mortalities may occur following collision with electrical lines. The construction of solar farms can lead to habitat destruction, the authors observe, and changes to plant composition and insect abundance, causing shifts in the diets of insectivorous birds.

The earliest scientific study of avian mortality at large scale utility solar plants was undertaken in 2016 by a group of scientists working for the US Government-funded Argonne National Laboratory. It was estimated that casualties at solar farms were similar to those found at wind turbine sites. Extrapolating from three large operations in southern California, the scientists suggested that between 37,800 and 138,600 birds died annually at solar parks across the US. These figures are of course nearly a decade old and appear on the low side. Whatever the true totals, there is evidence that between 2013 and 2022, US solar power generation rose 12-fold.

It might be pardonable to accept some wildlife destruction if solar farms were any good. They are not. In 2020, the World Bank published a detailed study examining the solar energy potential of locations around the world. Out of 230 countries, the UK was ranked second to last, just ahead of nearby Ireland. The Sun rarely has its hat on in a British winter and on the days it does appear it is long gone by 5pm peak electricity time. Despite life-threatening intermittency disadvantages, the British Government has announced plans to cover vast swathes of the countryside with solar panels in a desperate attempt to triple solar power that will not be available when it is most needed. Reporting on the move, the BBC published a truly dumb quote from a member of the public – “when it’s in a field, hidden behind a bush, you don’t even really see it”.

Out of sight, out of mind, might be the conclusion to be drawn from the attitude of the Net Zero campaigner, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Consider the two quotes below and try to spot the difference between the first from a solar farm trade association and the second published by the RSPB.

“Solar farms can become havens for biodiversity, playing an important role in nature restoration across the country.”

“Solar farms provide an opportunity for the long-term existence of land in which wildlife can thrive, which could go a long way to help slow down the rate of decline of farmland birds.”

For its part, the RSPB is all in on the invented political climate crisis and wants to remove hydrocarbon use from modern industrial society within 20 years. As is becoming increasingly clear, this will lead to societal breakdown with food shortages that could be partially relieved in the short-term by slaughtering all the available wildlife! In the RSPB’s fantasy land it calls for an increase in solar, onshore and offshore wind. It appears to simply ignore the plight of millions of bats and large raptors such as eagles and hawks. They cannot escape the pull of giant skyscraper-high blades, which are also clearing the area of tonnes of insects. It was recently estimated that 1,200 tonnes of insects are wiped out every year during the plant growing season in Germany alone. The RSPB is also seemingly unaware of the disturbing rise in whale, dolphin and porpoise strandings on UK shores that appear to track the growth of offshore wind capacity. Deaths of these cetaceans have doubled since the turn of the century and are now running at over 1,000 a year.

In promoting collectivist political change, the wrong sort of ecological disasters are simply ignored, or clumsily explained away, by narrative-driven commentators of every kind.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.