Mojave Desert solar plant kills 6,000 birds a year | Hacker News Reader

Mojave Desert solar plant kills 6,000 birds a year

latimes.com

61 pointsslackpad75 comments

Not that I don't think 6k birds isn't an unfortunate number, but even if we built 1,000 more of these power plants they'd only kill about 0.20% of the amount of birds killed by cats in the US every year [0].

[0] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/29/cats-wi...

It would be more interesting to look at what kind of birds are killed.

May be a necessary evil

However then uniqueness of this is the concentrated location of the deaths. Solve it at one place and you prevent thousands.

Cats are everywhere

Ban cats and you solve it in one location. This does not happen in part because people don't really care that much about wild birds.

Ban cats and you still have feral cats. They eat birds because nobody's keeping them inside away from the wild birds.

Wild cats don't go after birds as much because they are looking for food not entertainment. Further wild cat density is fairly low outside of populated areas with endless supplies of mouse food.

is that true? Are birds not considered food for domestic cats? my own experience was that birds were caught and eaten.

It's not that they won't; it's that birds are harder to catch than things that can't fly.

You won't have feral cats for long if you hunt them like wolves and rats were hunted in the past.

Were we ever successful against rats?

$5 a cat skin would be in line with the solution that almost drove the bald eagle to extinction

Until people start breeding cats to get the reward.

And hundreds of millions ("Between 365 and 988 million"[0]) birds die annually from flying into buildings. There are organizations that encourage buildings to be built with bird friendly designs (especially when it comes to glass), though I've never seen much general interest in it.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/stop-...

Let's put scale into perspective here. One plant = 6000. millions of buildings = millions of birds.

I don't know what to think.

Some more scale: One 390MW plant = 300 thousand households

If your average bird-killing building uses less power than about 500 households, the power plant is still coming out ahead.

You are comparing an artificial man-made killing machine with natural predator. With your logic, one day robots will be able to justify killing their human overlords.

A little perspective is in order. The birds are not the "overlords" of the machinery.

Cats are usually a predator introduced by humans though, so they aren't exactly natural either.

Where is the natural predator in this comparison? Domestic cats are man-made as well - until very recently, the whole point of domesticated cats was to stand guard and murder varmints getting into your grain stockpiles, the more prolifically and efficiently the better.

House cats are not indigenous to the majority of the world and certainly not to North America. The robots comment doesn't follow.

Cats are indigenous to every continent save Antarctica. One of the most widespread, adaptable creatures in the world. Housecats are not genetically different from wild cats - they can interbreed and often do.

.. and Australia.

The native species that is closest would be the marsupial "cat" the Tiger Quoll.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_quoll

There was also the Tasmanian Tiger, aka thylacine but they're extinct.

Mountain lions and lynx are indigenous to North America, neither hunt songbirds. House cats are from the Near East.

Bobcat?

Yes, there's those too. Same group as the Lynx. But neither Lynx, Bobcat, nor Mountain Lion are decimating bird populations.

Hm. Cats come from the Fertile Crescent but that was 10,000 years ago. Since then they've gone everywhere. I wonder when they first came to North America? Was it just hundreds of years ago, or thousands?

Domestic cats come from the Fertile Crescent.

The animals they were domesticated from have been present in much of Africa, Asia and Europe for a couple million years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat

Housecats likely came with sailing ships as onboard ratters (the same way they have come to many islands). Lynx, lion, etc are much older.

Indeed. This is non-story.

That alternative forms of power kill wildlife is regular talking point of the entrenched fossil fuel energy giants. As if coal fired power plants and oil fields are wildlife sanctuaries. I'd be interested in who is pulling the strings on this one at the LA Times.

The politicians they own also shameless love talking about those birds as well. And yes, fossil fuels kill several orders of magnitude more birds per year than renewables. Still, PV is a better source anyway.

This is not a non-story, at least for me. I didn't know about it and I find it interesting. Then again, I know 6000 is probably peanuts in comparision with, wild guess, birds and other species dying from cancer or other diseases because of the resulting smokes/particles/toxins released by burning stuff to get energy. Or maybe worse: whole species going extinct because their land is put under water to build a dam.

I dunno, I think it is a good bug report. Would be great to solve.

My mom's cat kills about 500 birds a year...

It depends on what the birds are. The plant is on a migration pathway so vulnerable birds may be getting incinerated. Also, if it were attracting raptors, losses are a much bigger deal.

Kitty isn't killing falcons.

With the amount birds (and other small creatures) I find dead, dismembered and half eaten on my doorstep, I find it hard to believe that it's as much as 0.2% ... I only have 3 cats and one of them is a kitten, so I can't believe she's that effective yet. I've not had them very long. I'd wager if I bagged all of their kills I'd have 6,000 on my property alone by the end of the year. I'm one farm of hundreds in our area, many of whom probably have cats to keep the rodent population down.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that while it's unfortunate that this renewable power resource isn't completely benign as we'd like to believe, it must be a slow news day to be writing about the 6,000 birds a year it kills given its size. I imagine if you cordoned off an area of a similar size and threw in a couple of dozen cats in there, even with food and water, you'd chalk up similar numbers.

"In addition, coyotes eat dozens of road runners trapped along the outside of a perimeter fence that was designed to prevent federally threatened desert tortoises from wandering onto the property."

Well, nice to hear the ACME(tm) solar plant trap finally did the trick for Wile E. Coyote...

Clearly the solution is to paint a black half-circle on the fence that looks like a tunnel. The roadrunners will be able to pass through but not the hapless coyote.

That's 16 birds a day. Unless the birds are endangered, that seems like a relatively small number for 390 MW of mostly green power.

74 MW of solar power in 2015 (up by a factor of about 1.4 from 2014 but still only about 2/3 the planned output). At the cost of $2.2B, and 3500 acres (14 km^2) of steel and precision-ground glass and wilderness.

The Ivanpah facility was built on public land, not wilderness.

What makes public land not wilderness?

In this context, it's a US federal government designation for protected land. http://wilderness.org/article/wilderness-designation-faqs

The word does also mean in some contexts any land that is undeveloped, so the meaning can be overloaded.

Update: The 74 MW figure is given by EIA as "net solar generation". The plant also burns natural gas, and made slightly more power in total (which still rounds to 74 MW on average for the year). In particular, it burned 564,814 mcf of natgas, which is worth 9 MW in our existing fleet of combined-cycle power plants. But Ivanpah made < 1 MW out of it, according to EIA.

It's unclear how EIA is partitioning the plant's output. If we use the total generation and subtract the potential (or CO2-equivalent) value of the natgas, it made only 66 MW from the sun.

Wikipedia cites 652,375 MWh of "solar only" production in 2015, with natural gas consumption listed separately. That works out to an average 74.4 MW output from the sun alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#I...

Out of curiosity, why did you subtract the potential natgas from the actual solar output, instead of the actual gas output you just cited?

It's not clear how the natgas output is being measured. It's used to bring the working fluid up to temperature. Either the true solar output is lower than stated or the plant is using natgas extremely inefficiently (getting 0.9 instead of 9 MW of it). In the latter case, it's still a cost of obtaining the solar energy that should be accounted for.

Wikipedia has the total and solar-only figures switched, as can be seen by visiting the citations given. The solar-only figure is 644,506 MWh.

I wonder how many birds are killed by coal and natural gas to produce 390 MW

I don't have any estimates for coal handy, but here are some other numbers for reference:

Syncrude says their tar sand surface mining operations (the most extensive form of oil mining in wide practice) kill 2.5 birds/PJ.

For wind power, estimates of annual bird deaths for the U.S. circa 2013 include 234,000[1], 440,000[2], and 573,000 (including 83,000 raptors and not including 888,000 bats)[3]. EIA says wind made 507 PJ in 2012[4]. So it's something like 800/PJ.

For the U.S., a 2014 meta-analysis[5] gives 600 million[6] fatal collisions with buildings each year. A 2013 study says, "free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually".[7]

Ivanpah made 74 MW of solar electricity in 2015 (644,506 MWh, according to EIA). So 2600/PJ.

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.10.007

[2] http://1.usa.gov/IhyaHv p.188

[3] http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wsb.260

[4] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html

[5] http://dx.doi.org/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1

[6] They give a range from 365-988 and a median of 599. Gotta love that kind of precision!

[7] http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380

>Syncrude says their tar sand surface mining operations (the most extensive form of oil mining in wide practice) kill 2.5 birds/PJ.

That seems way too low. I feel like I've read about huge bird kills from migratory birds landing in the containment ponds.

It may be. Oil has a really high energy density though.

Overall, surface mining of tar sands has to be one of the worst ways to get energy (in situ extraction techniques like SAGD do somewhat better).

That's true. I hadn't considered energy density.

Call me a jerk, but what is the real problem here? Can someone bother to actually quantify the risk to the ecosystem? There are plenty of unfortunate ways that different critters die all the time whether natural or unnatural. However, the mere fact that it is sad to think about means nothing.

"coyotes eat dozens of road runners trapped along the outside of a perimeter fence" i've heard that before...

The coyotes in the Mojave buy their traps on Amazon instead of relying on the Acme Corporation.

I wonder if they have tried or are considering spreading a scented substance (a powder?) in the immediate area. It wouldn't stop birds from flying into the solar plant, but it might condition the roadrunners such that they know not to run in that direction when fleeing a coyote.

It could be costly anywhere else, but in the mojave desert, scent probably lingers for a much longer period of time. That's my guess, anyway.

I don't know roadrunners specifically, but in general birds don't have a great sense of smell, and don't much use it day to day.

A visual warning would work better for birds. I wonder if there is something about the fence that makes it "invisible" to roadrunners.

Methyl anthranilate [0], commonly used as artificial grape flavoring and naturally found in Concord grapes, is a bird repellent. They can certainly smell it, if not other odors.

If you want to keep birds out of your strawberry patch, for instance, you can sprinkle packets of grape Kool-Aid over it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_anthranilate

> They have fitted each tower with machines that emit a nonlethal avian respiratory irritant derived from grape juice concentrate, a method typically used to keep birds from congregating on agricultural fields and commercial centers.

Your comments might be helpful to discussion if you read the article first to understand what has been already tried instead of jumping to offer a solution.

He was referring to the roadrunners, dude.

Ivanpah is a black mark on renewable energy. Its price was ridiculously expensive, and it has failed to perform to expectations.

The good news is that the industry has learned from it. Almost nobody is doing concentrated solar thermal anymore - photovoltaics are better in nearly every way.

What are the numbers behind your statement? Price info is easy enough to find, but what's the conversion rate from KW of solar energy to KW of electrical energy for concentrated solar thermal vs. PV? And is that the right metric to use?

The right metric is probably cost per annual kWh.

1 kW of photovoltaic (PV) will generate about 1,800 kWh per year over its lifetime, and costs probably about $1,800 to build at utility scale. So $1 per annual kWh.

Things are more complicated for CSP, because it usually has thermal storage built in. This allows it to generate more kWh of energy per kW of max power. For example Crescent Dunes generates is 110 MW, and generates 501 GWh per year: 4,500 kWh per kW. But it cost $1 billion to build, so it's about $2 per annual kWh.

Ivanpah does not have storage. Its cost per annual kWh is over $3.

(I am glossing over the fact that PV lasts for "just" 25-30 years and CSP lasts longer. Revenue generated 30 years from now is not worth very much.)

EDIT: to answer your question about "conversion rate from KW of solar energy to KW of electrical energy" - this does not matter, at least here in the US. We have way, way, way more solar energy hitting the ground than we will ever need. Converting it efficiently just doesn't matter.

In the U.S. we eat over 20 million birds every day. Not saying they shouldn't make some effort to reduce the number of unintended bird deaths. But give me a break!

Would be amazing if there was some futuristic tracking of the birds, then obscure the relevant part of the mirrors with lcds so they can fly without being cooked.

6000 birds/years in one location is a very big deal.

> But company officials suggest that estimates of the number of birds killed annually at the site are exaggerated, and federal wildlife authorities believe they are too low.

In practically all cases like these, "company officials" always say things are exaggerated. Whether it's about the effects of smoking, pesticide residues in foods, etc.

I was sort of hoping they'd have a video...

i know right?!

i clicked onto the "video" they had and it was a glorified slide show...

Here is one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6s2zu4_2U

It would be interesting to compare how many birds are killed by flying into the windows of glass skyscrapers.

Anyhow, it's good that solar thermal will soon not be cost competitive vs solar PV + battery.

What is the alternative ? Building a nuclear power plant ? the same newspaper will come up with a story of how nuclear waste is going to kill babies with cancer. We need to calm.

We should all kill ourselves and let nature return to unmolested beauty.

I think.

What if they ran a ring of flood lights (to attract insects) to create a fence around the solar plant, so birds wouldn't enter the plant area itself?

But wouldn't increased insects cause the solar panels needing to be cleaned a lot more and cause reduced efficiency?

and fossil fuels are directly responsible for the largest ecological disasters the planet has ever seen, so...

kfc kills more

Flagged because this is an attempt to turn non-news into something clickbaity.

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