Breaking WIND: windmills vs. the birds

Part of what an energy conference teaches professionals is how to successfully control industry PR, defend its image, etc. Just as mining companies must know how to construct themselves not look like environmental monsters for removing mountaintops, wind ability developers have to know how to reply questions from animal rights groups who argue that turbine kill large numbers of birds.

The young and idealistic wind industry wants to proceed sustainably, developing farms in safe areas and backing up its practices with peer reviewed studies that tabulate the exact impact on birds and bats. Hopefully, they can achieve that panacea. According to the DOE, the 20% by 2030 initiative is going to require 75,000 more turbines and $60B worth of new transmission lines — so even though the impacts may not be great per turbine, the overall impact is going to be substantial.
Seminars citing a new NYSERDA study were revealed today, assessing the wildlife impacts of wind turbines on wildlife. As nearly everyone expected, wind potential has the lowest impact on wildlife

of any other major energy sources. To be blunt, wind farms have not yet been linked with any major impact on wildlife populations. The highest level of wildlife risks is defined as ‘major effects on population,’ which nearly all forms of energy (aside from wind and nuclear) create at one of the 6 stages of energy production:

• Extraction
• Transportation
• Construction
• Generation
• Transmission
• Decomission

To start with, wind doesn’t require the first two stages — so extraction and transportation don’t factor in at all. Of those last 4, wind has not been show to greatly affect the populations of birds and bats in a wind farm area. The biggest surprise that came out of the study is that hydro-power is actually a high risk resource when it comes to wildlife. Since hydro-power actually greatly effects waterways and wetland areas, they alter their surrounding ecosystems heavily. Decommissioning a hydro-power basically involves draining a man-made lake — which is not so great for the ecosystem that’s cropped up around it.

[Source] Josh Loposer

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