Originally published Saturday, November 23, 2013 at 3:10 PM
Wind-farm bird deaths bring $1M in fines
Wyoming wind-farm operator Duke Energy Renewables pleaded guilty in the first federal case of its kind, admitting its turbines at two sites have killed 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds since 2009.
— Seattle Times,
story from The New York Times and The Associated Press
h/t to Roger Andrews on Suggestions.
I might have a different take on this from Tallbloke and at least some readers. Me out on a surprising limb is not unusual, often because eggs will get broken, there is no such thing as absolute safety, only death (from binding unable to do anything), so the real dilemma is the really the balance of life from all perspective and the environment from all perspectives.
Precautionary Principle? Sure but unlike nerks it is a recursive thing, keep applying to each answer, and then boring, comes down good old common sense, fairness and so on. No fancy name needed.
I’m not sure this court decision is a sensible ruling regardless of wide wishes to get rid of atrocious engineering design, so from many perspectives.
How many raptors die from propeller aircraft? Do you start to see the point? Or take “It’ll have to be the Hudson”, airbus ditches successfully after a double engine bird strike on take-off. Back story here, environmentalists had successfully preventing culling of the birds.
They were shot. (meaning of they left for amusement)
Conflicts happen. Can’t have both.
Perhaps a reasonable position is dealing with any critical problems and what might be true here is removing space for birds needing space. Not about the droves of common species. Is it really the case there is no space for eg. raptors? In addition some are attracted to kill so even if they weren’t there, there is an attraction.
Another take on this is design. I am critical of this from the design perspective of the windmills for many detail reasons, which I want out of sight and out of earshot or feeling, machinery doing what it should, invisible, works, forget it. (note: I have put footnotes to other items of current interest, see 1 in this context, about pushing symbols and things in you face as part of manipulation etc.)
Fast moving blades are optional where I expect a lower speed would be far less harmful, still should not be out in free air anyway. I don’t know a thing about aerodynamics, sorry, I do. Aiming for a high aspect ratio does lead to high tip speed, a compromise.
A side effect of this will be teaching a bully how to be a better bully instead of removing the fundamental issue, which is a poor solution to energy supply.
Incidentally I’ve passed up a number of good stories I’ve spotted as too stressful to handle. Have a read
- Donna has a superb item which will pass straight by many readers for what it is illustrating, you need certain knowledge. It ought to be extremely disturbing yet is common these days.
The Creepy Climate Conference - Nope, decided it is too much.
Post by Tim, hoping this is not too opinionated or political.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Is there any reason an engineering solution cannot be found? Why do raptors try to fly through windmills? I believe they must be able to see straight through them, the way we can see a yard through the slats in a fence. The three blades make up a very small percentage of the total area they sweep out, so there is almost no block to their vision. All that has to be done is to make the circle visible. This could be done by a screen mounted just upwind of the blades. At the enormous cost of a single tower, the addition of a screen cannot be more than 1-2% of the total cost. On the other hand, if they are actually pulled in to the blades by the airflow, this would not work (unless the screen were somewhat soft and flexible–one imagines the bird stuck there until the wind drops and then flying away to fly another day). This is very likely stupid and unworkable, but surely an engineer could solve the problem.
Lance I think this is a case of painstaking research first rather than ad hoc guesses. Data collections, observation and probably, a lot of talking to experience.
The disc will be sparse. Avian visibility is however a peculiar subject, they don’t see as we do. This also varies by species.
Detour to a general animal thing, eye position tends to separate predator and predated, humans, raptors including owls have eyes and vision for looking in detail one direction, stereoscopic, better distance sense. Predated tend to all around vision, eyes on the side of head,
Sensitivity tends to be for movement. Some hawks apparently have a very narrow high acuity part of their vision, can see detail at long distance. This necessarily precludes seeing elsewhere, perhaps why a blade will catch them.
Small predated have to cope with speed diving predators, which for example dive through a flock picking off one target.
A relatively simple solution might be bird detection, too many close by, slow the blades as fast as feasible and deploy bird scaring. Not that different from the airfield problem, a cost burden.
End the windmills. They are hideously expensive, horribly wasteful, terribly destructive of landscape. Windmills are undependable. They make no economic sense. They do not “help” the climate. The money wasted on windmills could have been used to clean up coal power, build nuke power, reduce soot worldwide.
Lance, hanging stuff from the blades only makes them even more inefficient, with drag and weight. And more vulnerable to wind damage.
Let’s just shut down large scaled, mandated rate payer subsidized windmills. They are going to be largely gone in the next ten years or so anyway. Let’s get it over with and move on.
The U.S. temperature as in January. This is what will be in January?
Snow on the south.
In the rotation plane, tips approach edge-on, a very difficult visual target. And insects and hence insectovores and hence raptors are attracted to exactly that plane.
IAC, we now know how many birds you can buy for $1M.
BTW, anent Donna’s observation about the UN claiming diplo-immunity for its Haitian cholera crime, AFAIK its diplos have immunity from all national law, everywhere. The possibilities are limitless!
There is also the issue of natural selection: Over time, will larger birds tend to avoid places where there are wind turbines, notwithstanding the road-kill effect? Do hedgehogs individually eschew loitering on roads, or the ones that don’t cross quickly have simply been selected-out from the population?
Crows on UK motorways have an amazing ability to simply hop over oncoming vehicles, often approaching well in excess of 70mph.
I too, am not enamoured of the precautionary principle when it amounts to petty fantasizing about everything that might go wrong. Common sense requires that risks and benefits have to be balanced all the time. I said something similar recently at Climate etc
The anti-CO2 mindset becoming enshrined into the climate change act is probably the most pernicious demonstration yet of the precautionary principle in action (possibly lubricated with the grease of enviro-political corruption).
Brian H: The $1 million didn’t buy any birds. What it bought was a “stay out of jail” card.
Government works in mysterious ways. Remember that they got rid of Al Capone on tax evasion, not on being a crime boss? I would prefer to get rid of wind turbines by cutting their subsidies, but any small step is welcome.
I die a little every time I hear of one of these majestic birds being carved up by these near useless monuments to ignorance and fear, and the avarice which feeds upon them.