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posted by CoolHand on Friday June 16 2017, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the gentle-giant dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @11:23PM (#526681)

    In other words, for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants killed 2,118 birds.

    You mean, for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear plants killed 47 birds and fossil fuel powered plants killed 2,071 birds.

    It's a bullshit statistic, of course. A per-Wh basis lets you compare the idea of building more wind vs. more nuclear to meet a given projected demand, or building more wind and shutting down fossil-fuel plants vs. doing nothing. Multiplying this out to national totals, on the other hand, is basically useless. Consider, even if wind turbines really were veritable avian salad-shooters, with that 15:1 per-GWh ratio reversed: these statistics would still make fossil plants look worse simply because of their enormously larger market share. But even with a worthless statistic, there's no reason to merge unrelated categories like that.

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  • (Score: 2) by tfried on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:56PM

    by tfried (5534) on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:56PM (#527093)

    I totally agree with most of your post. Comparing the grand totals, when the market share is so imbalanced is simply polemic. But:

    Why merge nuclear and fossil fuel?

    Because wind energy is being singled out as "the" bird killer by its critics. So focussing on wind energy vs. established does make a certain bit of sense.