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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @09:59PM (6 children)
Power generation has nothing on the common house cat.
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170588511/killer-kitties-cats-kill-billions-every-year [npr.org]
(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...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 17 2017, @02:14AM
That just means that each house cat is equivalent to several Gigawatt hours of power generation.
Power kitties!
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Common Joe on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:55AM (2 children)
Going off topic: This article makes a lot of assumptions, but I crunched numbers using only the numbers in the article.
Americans own 84 million cats. 40 - 70 percent are allowed to go outside. 50 - 80 percent of those are actually hunters. 84M * 0.7 * 0.8 = 47.04M on the high end. 84M * 0.4 * 0.5 = 16.8M on the low end. Their claim that there could be up to 47M pets cats that hunt could perhaps maybe be true if you took their upper ends. Now it gets crazy.
"Based on previous studies, he estimates there could be anywhere from 30 million to 80 million [house cats + feral cats] in the U.S., most of them out hunting." Huh? Where did these numbers come from? Why is he using the previous studies to support the idea of how bad cats are for the environment? The low end of the stats from his studies are lower than the low end of the previous estimates... but then he uses the other studies to do computations about bird killings. [Sigh.]
"We estimate somewhere between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds a year [are killed by both house and feral cats]." Ok. So, how bad is it? 1.4B / 80M = 17.5 birds per year per cat (low end). 3.7B / 30M = 123 birds per year per cat (high end).
That's a margin of error of about 700%. (123 / 17.5 = 7.03) Assuming the worst, on average a cat kills about 3 birds per week. (365 days / 123 birds = 2.96) The best? A cat kills one bird every 3 weeks. (365 days / 17.5 = 20.86)
And that is how bad cats are according to this article from 2013.
Honestly, I don't know how good these numbers are or how many birds are killed in relation to the wind farms, but if I were a journalist, I would have questioned the scientist a bit more in this interview. Journalism sucks.
Back on topic. (Warning: Rant.) These three studies contradict what we know about bird strikes and wind farms. It's 2017, wind farms have been around for a long time, and that means 1) the three studies are bogus because they completely contradict what we know, 2) all of the other previous studies were bogus because they completely contradict what we know, 3) politics were involved, 4) journalism sucks, or 5) some combination of options 1 through 4. Personally, I suspect politics and bad journalism.
It's good that we have three studies contradicting years of known fact. Now comes the hard part. What is the truth?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:31PM
It's good that we have three studies contradicting years of
known fact.previous studies. Now comes the hard part.What is the truth?Which more closely models the current circumstances?FTFY
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday June 19 2017, @12:08PM
Or 6) there have been efforts to correct the problem [motherjones.com] and they may actually be effective.
(Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Friday June 16 2017, @10:20PM (4 children)
They're suckers for propaganda by big oil. They believed the same thing in about my sparrow-fired power plant.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 16 2017, @10:24PM (1 child)
Can you convert it for me? I have my Tesla Coils ready, but I really prefer my Lightning Made of Owls.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday June 16 2017, @10:25PM
We're scientists here, electrocuting birds is net negative energy we have a much more efficient "giant glass wall for them to ram into and fall" solution.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 16 2017, @11:46PM
This is just another example of Leftist hypocrites selectively being righteous for their own selfish needs.
Allowing unfettered hordes of third-worlders is okay as long as they're not in their doorstep, but Earth-saving wind-farms are not okay [washingtontimes.com] even miles from their houses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday June 17 2017, @02:16AM
I've always considered the bird kills to be a bogus story. I have a friend that does maintenance on turbines in Oklahoma, and he has never actually found and blade-kill near his rigs. He has found birds nesting in the nooks and carnies, because not all models are perfectly faired.
I suspect the substations near nuclear and fossil plants are what kill most birds.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday June 16 2017, @10:27PM (5 children)
Other major contributors to bird death include:
- cats
- pesticides
- skyscrapers with reflective windows
- starvation
- cold
It was always a nonsense argument used by fossil fuel corporate spokesweasels to try to peel away the "Oh the poor animals!" environmentalists from the anti-fossil fuel efforts. But even the Audubon Society supports wind power [audubon.org] if placed properly.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday June 16 2017, @10:35PM (4 children)
So, what we need is cat-powered generators! Not sure how much energy you get, burning moggies, but think of the birds!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday June 16 2017, @10:39PM (3 children)
It won't work: The cats will just sit there.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:02AM
What if we add a string or a cat treat or a cat treat suspended from a string?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:03AM (1 child)
No, no, see, you strap a piece of toast to the cat's back butter-side-up, then tie a big fookin' magnet to it, then pick the cat up and let go of it when it's dead-center in the middle of the generator. Murphy's Law does the rest!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:44PM
One consequence of Murphy's Law is that whenever you try to explicitly trigger Murphy's law, it will fail.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday June 16 2017, @10:57PM (3 children)
"nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants killed 2,118 birds."
Nuclear plants don't kill birds: people running nuclear plants kill birds.... with guns!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @11:36PM (1 child)
Based on a sample size of one, chicken coops are responsible for an average of about 0.5 fatalities per chicken capacity per year, or a lifetime average of around 2 fatalities per chicken.
We're working on a selective breeding program to develop a population of house sparrows with chicken-coop-avoidance instinct, but these things take time. Time and ammo.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 16 2017, @11:47PM
Human fatalities? I believe it, those coops are full of mean motherfuckers and they can and will rip a young human or small animal to shreds.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 17 2017, @02:17AM
And they've got nothing on airports, especially since the "Sully" event.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)
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.
(Score: 2) by tfried on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:56PM
I totally agree with most of your post. Comparing the grand totals, when the market share is so imbalanced is simply polemic. But:
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @11:58PM
Fried chicken.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ese002 on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:48AM
Among other problems, the nuclear bird kills comes from two mismanaged uranium mines, except that one the mines is a copper mine and collisions with a cooling stack that is actually attached to a fossil fuel plant [atomicinsights.com]
There are a lot of back and forth claims [biodiversivist.com] due in large part to comparing inconsistent data.
(Score: 5, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:54AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 17 2017, @02:21AM (5 children)
Too lazy to read the article, but are they counting bird deaths from fossil fuel by poisoning? Acid rain, heavy metal broadcasting, habitat destruction for the coal strip mines, fly ash runoff into waterways, etc.?
Windmills are right up-front about it - look around the base and count the dead birds (maybe a few only get grazed and go off to die elsewhere....)
Fossil fuels get you from so many angles that are very difficult to take accurate account of.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:16AM (3 children)
I RTFA and it didn't say how a nuke plant quietly sitting there emitting steam manages to kill more birds than spinning blades of death, it didn't even hint. We are expected to simply believe them because.... ????
They lie. They lie because it what they are. It is the core of the Prog personality. Once you know that you don't need to spend an hour trying to figure out how they are lying, dig up enough details to document where they lied, etc. And it wouldn't help anyway. Try it, find where they lied and post; then watch the usual suspects ignore it or call you vile things AND ignore the evidence. Progs say it, it is probably a lie, they say something that requires a really big stretch of the imagination to even get to 'could be plausible' and it isn't worth wasting the mental energy to go playing the Myth Busters home edition with them. Lie.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 17 2017, @09:43AM (2 children)
Both TFS and the abstract in the study tells us how they kill more birds.
2006 there was abot 11.5GW of wind installed in the US which is about 15, 20 to 30TWh/yr (cf 15%, 20%, 30%)
Nuclear has been producing about 800TWh/yr in the US for about a decade.
Since 327/7 ~ 45 that tells us the avg capacity factor for wind was 15%
Also - it tells us that 45times as much production will kill 45times as many birds in linear models
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:54PM (1 child)
English isn't your strong suit I take it. Lets hope you do better reading tech documents. You repeated the same unsupported assertion as a reply to the question of HOW a nuke plant kills more birds than windmills. Yes, we know the greens SAY a nuke plant kills more, but I'm still waiting for a proposed mechanism for how a nuke plant kills ONE bird.
If they are doing some bogus math on every raw material that goes into a nuke plant and handwaving up some number of birds killed then lets see their math, lets see the math on all of the things that go into building, transporting, installing, maintaining and decommissioning a windmill as well to make it an apples to apples comparison. But no, it is all fact free assertions we are expected to take on faith, yet the people making these assertions have very poor track records of trustworthiness and their loudest supporters are you; not the sharpest tool in the shed and apparently very prone to religious sorts of appeals to faith and obnoxious evangelism.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:23PM
Well then, if we are going to nit-pick to that degree I really hope it isn't your native tounge either.
I mean, the article never said _a_ nuclear plant killed more birds (it said the fleet in total killed more birds) and for that matter it also said that per Wh that nuclear and wind killed about as many birds. (Btw, from where did you get the nuclear plant "emitting steam"? Unless it has a cooling tower (not the norm) it doesn't emit more steam than a comparable industrial site during normal operation)
But in all fairness - yes, I didn't look it up. But considering that it basically says that a small (1000MWe) nuclear unit would kill one bird roughly every third hour, and a quick lookup says that a normal nuclear unit has about 400-700 workers and we can assume most of them arrive by car so I'd say it is in the upper end of the ballpark (or put another way - each worker accidently kills four to seven birds per year on average) [especially when considering the about 600 extra that is brought in for service and upgrades every second year - often travelling from far away]. And let's also not forget that stuff like grassfires, wildlife eating ducklings and such also occurs in the nuclear plant.
No need to even get to the nuclear component, a similarly sized non-nuclear industrial complex placed near a forest with its own harbour or railway would get into that count as well.
And to really top it off - assume half of the workers actually eat (a quarter of a) chicken once a week, that would mean some 400*52 / 2 / 4 = 2600 birds extra killed per year (heck, that alone would cause about 0.3 bird deaths per GWh).
Or tl;dr - the reason why I didn't look it up for nuclear is that it is in the ballpark of what I've seen for other industrial complexes of similar size, and in the only sense TFS and TFA claimed nuclear killed more than wind was in absolute numbers so I answered in regards to that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @10:38AM
(Score: 3, Touché) by deimtee on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:24AM
If we make the towers taller, and hang 10 or 20 metres of piano wire with a weight on the end from the tip of each blade then wind could do better.
Maybe put some bird food around the base, or on little platforms up near the generator housing too.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.