SoylentNews

Wind Farms are Hardly the Bird Slayers They're Made Out to Be

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

Phoenix666 writes:

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.

---

Original Submission

• It’s Friday. (Score: 5, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:54AM

  by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:54AM (#526709) Homepage Journal

  How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster. Not only are wind farms disgusting looking, but even worse they are bad for people’s health. Wind farms are killing many thousands of birds. They make hunters look like nice people! Thousands of birds are lying on the ground. And the eagle. There are places for wind but if you go to various places in California, wind is killing all of the eagles. You know, certain parts of California  -- they’ve killed so many eagles. You know, they put you in jail if you kill an eagle. And yet these windmills are killing them by the hundreds. All your birds, killed. You know, the environmentalists never talk about that. And you look at all these windmills. Honestly, half of them are broken. They're very, very expensive and they're killing our property values. I've been to Palm Springs, they've ruined it. It was a great place to golf, now it looks like a junkyard. Terrible! You know, you’re driving into Palm Springs, California, and it looks like a poor man’s version of Disneyland. It’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen. Windmills rusting and rotting. Give me good old coal mines. Give me goddamned steam! The digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good. All this cyber is a Chinese hoax. It was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. It's killing our economy and it's killing our birds. And it's ugly. #TrumpTurnberry [twitter.com]

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+3
  Informative=1, Funny=1, Underrated=1, Total=3
  Extra 'Funny' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5