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People who oppose wind farms often claim wind turbine blades kill large numbers of birds, often referring to them as "bird choppers". And claims of dangers to iconic or rare birds, especially raptors, have attracted a lot of attention.
Wind turbine blades do indeed kill birds and bats, but their contribution to total bird deaths is extremely low, as these three studies show.
A 2009 study using US and European data on bird deaths estimated the number of birds killed per unit of power generated by wind, fossil fuel and nuclear power systems.
It concluded, "Wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fuelled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh."
That's nearly 15 times more. From this, the author estimated that wind farms killed approximately seven thousand birds in the United States in 2006 but nuclear plants killed about 327,000 and fossil-fuelled power plants 14.5 million.
In other words, for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants killed 2,118 birds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @10:07PM (1 child)
Hell I almost stepped on one today. Did not expect it to be hanging out on the sidewalk...
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:27PM
You - and house cats for that matter - are contributing to the evolutionary process.
Birds that avoid cats will prosper relative to birds that don't.
Cats that avoid traffic will prosper relative to cats that don't.
We have lots of feral cats in our neighborhood. I very rarely see one that has been run down by a vehicle. In fact, it's been more than a couple of years. I have moderate confidence that the ones that aren't wary enough have already been culled pretty thoroughly. The remainder and their offspring seem to have adjusted in a fairly short time frame, evolutionarily speaking.
There doesn't seem to be any kind of a bird shortage, either. So I'm thinking they're doing okay as a species. (I live in a low-population town in a very rural area.)
Overall, I'm a good deal more fond of cats than birds. Tends to leave me comparatively unmoved in re the plights of individual birds v. plights of individual cats...