Pardon my lexicographic faux pas, but windMILLS were also used to power other things, as well, such as water pumps for irrigation.
And my issue isn’t with an imagined aviary food processor, it is with wind farm companys’ choices of locations and with killing to prevent accidental killing. It’s a slippery slope thing, ya know… Monkeys with guns accelerate species towards extinction much faster than the blades of a wind turbine.
They are not killing to prevent killing. It’s like you getting an incidental take license for birds, cats, dogs and deer when you buy your car, because sooner or later you’re going to hit/kill one, and it just so happens they’re protected.
NOTE my msg bd handle… I do NOT hate wind power, I’m just questioning their business and environmental ethics. And can someone define ‘incidental take’ for me? I mean how close does a bird have to get to the machine before being labeled an intruder and being taken down? Do they have radar with computer operated fire power?
Geezus… they still built the damn wind park in a known nesting area!! Was that incidental?? I don’t think so.
post #7.
It’s reasonably well explained in the OP’s link: Because some birds are expected to be killed by the proposed wind turbines, a permit is obtained to avoid this “incidental” mortality being a violation of the law. There is absolutely no suggestion that eagles will be killed by any process other than collisions with the turbines.
Old-fashioned windmills don’t move anywhere near fast enough to be an important hazard.
Have a look at a Bald Eagle range map.
Bummer wind power industry.
Seriously though, this permit represents an enlightened attempt at studying, monitoring and mitigating damage to wildlife populations, not carte blanch to kill.
I’m very curious if there will be any long-term effects on the population, based on which birds die out and which don’t. Right now, elephants in Africa are losing their tusks because all the tusked elephants get killed.
Wind farms need to be built in areas with high wind speed. Sometimes these areas coincide with bird habitats or migration paths. They often try to site it for a lower estimated number of bird kills, but getting it down to 0 is very unlikely.
Please read the other posts before falsely accusing them.
Note that the new very very large windmills turn much slower and thus kill less raptors, etc.
Yes, it’s not nice that wind power kills birds. But we have to remember TANSTAAFL. Solar, nuke, hydro- they all have some drawbacks. However, we need to stop burning oil, gas, coal. Note that burning those also kill birds.
They may be slower in terms of rpm, but probably not in terms of tip speed (which is what poses danger to flying critters).
As mentioned upthread, the efficiency of a windmill is related to tip speed ratio - the ratio of tip speed to windspeed. Aerodynamically, long wings - or long blades - can be expected to be more efficient than shorter ones (basically due to lower induced drag). So a giant windmill is likely to have higher tip speeds than a smaller one. Combine this with a larger swept area, and it’s likely to be considerably less bird-friendly.
I heard they were experimenting with false bird calls to keep away the prey birds. I wonder if they could do eagle territorial calls (if there are such things) to keep away the raptors?
I think this is an incorrect reading of the article. I think it is saying that some number of eagles might be killed by the turbines, and to allow this, there is this weird legalese that wold require the company to apply for a permit for killing eagles. They’re not going to go around with guns shooting them.
As an aside, since there’s an “Another viable option which I will describe below” poll option…
This is just begging for a workaround. If the utilities worked with defense contractors on this problem, I bet it’d be solved in a few years. Maybe a CIWS with active denial energy weapons that scare away eagles without leaving permanent harm.
Maybe UAVs directed by radar that dogfight the eagles and chase them away, all the while emitting a unique territorial call. I bet after a few generations, the eagles could be scared by the sound alone.
Maybe little ground robots shaped like field mice and armed with net guns or air jets that patrol the perimeter outside the farm; they would lure eagles in well outside the range of the turbines and then capture-and-release/scare them off.
Or maybe getting falconers to train a few tamed eagles who know how to navigate around wind turbines and having them patrol wind farms and chase off competitors.
If something works, design it, require it, and the utilities will just implement them as a cost of doing business.
Nope:
*Altamont Pass is different for two main reasons: turbine location and turbine design.
There are more than 4,000 wind turbines at the Altamont Pass energy farm in California. It’s one of the first wind farms in the United States, and its 20-year-old turbines are accordingly out-of-date. Their design has long since been abandoned: Latticework blades with small surface area are far from efficient for energy generation, and far from safe for birds. The lattice structure actually attracts large birds, because the frame makes for an excellent perch. Large birds like raptors are drawn to the blades, and collision rates are high as a result.
The other design issue is the blades’ low surface area, because less surface area means the blades have to spin faster to turn the electricity-generating turbines. The faster the blades spin, the more dangerous they are to birds flying near them. It’s unlikely that a bird that finds itself in the vicinity of the blades could ever make it through when they’re spinning so fast…In the past couple of decades, turbine designs have changed dramatically. Turbine blades are now solid, meaning no lattice structure to attract birds looking to perch. Also, the blades’ surface area is much larger, so they don’t have to spin as fast to generate power. Slower-moving blades mean fewer bird collisions…The Wisconsin Bird Initiative states that wind turbines have a “low impact” on avian mortality compared to window glass and communication towers [source: WBCI]. And in 2006, the Audubon Society gave its figurative seal of approval to the American Wind Energy Association. The president of the national organization is quoted by Renewable Energy World as stating, “When you look at a wind turbine, you can find the bird carcasses and count them. With a coal-fired power plant, you can’t count the carcasses, but it’s going to kill a lot more birds”*
and a different design would also help:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/wind-turbines-design-110922.html
*By going vertical, wind farms may just get a new life.
Putting windmills upright and spacing them more tightly together can generate more electricity on less land, and kill fewer birds or bats than traditional horizontal rotating wind turbines, according to new engineering research.*
Technically that would be a “wind pump”.
I would expect someone whose user name was Windsong to be more precise in their discussion of wind-powered machinery:D
I’m kidding, but the “wind turbine” is the correct industry term.
Not ones that are 300 feet high.
Really I can’t imagine why a bird would even go near those things.
Interesting. FYI for others, the previous page has a list of yearly bird deaths due to a variety of man-made causes. Wind turbines are currently a drop in the bucket, and wouldn’t move up in that list even with a thousand-fold increase in the numbers.
To be fair, those figures are for all birds. Cats are the largest factor, but I’d expect their relative contribution to deaths of raptors is much smaller, what with the adults being much larger, and their nests all being inaccessible on the sides of cliffs*.
*Unless cartoons have been lying to me all these years.
Yes, but the problem is they are a more significant source of death to raptors, which usually have long lives and breed less. A few less starlings or pidgeons won’t make much difference. But even a handful less peregrine falcons could hurt.
