The fact that wind turbines kill birds ranks right up there with the fact that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Those with an agenda take a tidbit of information, say two years in a school as a child, or one badly placed first generation wind farm, and they squeal and squeal and squeal until "everyone" knows and shares their pain.
We believe everyone in the wind industry would be perfectly happy if the Altamont Pass "Eagle Choppers" were picked up and carried away by a Pacific cyclone passing through the San Francisco Bay area.
Lets examine the situation in details and put to bed once and for all this vastly overblown concern for birds.
Drive an hour east of San Francisco on I-580 and you'll find Altamont Pass and thousand upon thousands of first generation wind turbines dating back to the early 1980s.
The problems with the Altamont site are simply and easily understood.
These turbines are machines like Enertech's 40 kilowatt turbine, with a forty four foot rotor diameter, mounted on lattice towers sixty to eighty feet high.
A turbine like this is mounted such that the blades may reach as low as forty feet above the ground - hunting height for a raptor and cruising height for a migratory bird on approach for landing.
A turbine this small spins very, very quickly. Birds that get near them don't have time to react.
A turbine of this size is often mounted on an inexpensive lattice tower - the perfect place for a raptor to sit and watch for prey.
Compare the Altamont turbines with a modern turbine, like this Suzlon 2.0 megawatt unit installed just a mile south of Virgin Lake, south of Ruthven Iowa. Oh, the small objects at the base are two large 4x4 trucks; the turbine was stopped for repairs in this photo and a crew was there working on it.
The hub height on this tower is 262' and the blades are 144' long, thusly never getting closer to the ground than 118'.
When you have a blade 144' long with a maximum tip speed of 156 miles per hour you can hear it clearly from a great distance - there is a great wooshing sound when it operates. Birds are not unaware that they're approaching a machine of this size and even a fast moving bird has ten or fifteen seconds to notice and inspect the situation.
A multimegawatt turbine will always be mounted on a cylindrical rolled steel tower. There isn't much to invite a bird around the base and one that did land on the nacelle wouldn't have too much trouble leaving even if they did go straight out through the blades; the 156 mph tip speed is impressive but the velocity of the blades near the hub isn't that much - they're in far more danger landing by the side of a busy highway.
The specific problem in the Altamont Pass area is the endangered Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos). The largest breeding population in the world lives right on top of this wind farm.
We found
this article, which seems to be well written and well backed with facts, but it indicates that total mortality for the Golden Eagle is on the order of two birds a month and the grand total is about a thousand birds of all types per year among the more than 5,200 turbines found there. Two dozen deaths a year in an endangered population is two dozen too many, but this sad situation is no reason for a planned wind farm based on modern turbines to be held up by NIMBYs/BANANAs desperately clinging to the concept that wind turbines kill birds.
We fully agree that an environmental assessment needs to be done for each new wind farm. We should be avoiding areas with endangered species and making sure that the open lands around the turbine bases are a positive factor in wildlife. This could be accomplished by banning mowing except in the immediate area around the electrical equipment at the base and requiring instead that the turbine owners plant and maintain natural plants that are beneficial to local species. This would reduce maintenance cost and please local outdoorsmen.
Virgin Lake is our editor's favorite kayaking destination. Three of the ten turbines in the area are visible from the water and serve as a constant reminder of the vision of the farmers who own the land around the lake; they formed a local group to finance and install this wind turbine farm.
(UPDATE: I seem to have made one small grammatical and two small spelling errors in the initial publication of this diary. I most humbly apologize to the obsessive compulsive candidate diarists who are so offended by this. All I have to offer in my defense is a simple excuse - I've got a small, inoperable aneurysm in my speech center that came close to bursting several times over the last four weeks. This has settled down now and there are just tiny artifacts in my spoken and written communication from it. I doubt so sensible a rationale will be forthcoming for the conduct this whole community has been subjected to by the aforementioned class of diarist.)