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Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

all going points. Also they kill birds. I read somewhere that the small ones kill more than the big ones - small ones spin faster?

the project seems a little misguided. India is a sunny place. Never been to India during monsoons, but if it is like costa rica, it'll rain in the mornings or at night. don't get too many overcast days.

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The number of birds killed by turbines is extremely small (hundreds of thousands [0]) compared to the number of birds killed by cats (hundreds of millions to billions [1, 2]).

[0] http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-... [1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cats-kill-more-one-billi... [2] (slight counterpoint to 1) http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...

Not to mention cars. I hit 1-3 birds a year in my car. If every car in the US hits one bird a year, that's 300 million birds.

The fact that cats kill birds in no way legitimizes killing of birds by wind turbines no matter the ratio of deaths. The two are unrelated, and one bad thing happening doesn't mean that we should pile on more unnecessary bad things. If anything it's the opposite, we should try not to add to the pile.

It's a big problem only in a few narrow corridors. The California coastal range has a few passes that are both migratory bird routes and good wind turbine sites for smaller turbines. Pacheco Pass is particularly tough, with row after row of older, smaller wind turbines (mostly 65KW) going on for miles. It's like a Veg-O-Matic chopper for migratory birds.

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