Painting wind turbine blades black help birds avoid deadly collisions (2020)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
> In the following three years, just six birds were killed by the painted turbines, compared to the 18 killed by four nearby unpainted turbines, per Ars Technica.
Seems like nothing but a distraction. My friend's cat (approximately 0.25m tall, negative 16 watts power production) is more of a menace to avian wildlife than an eighty-meter diameter, 2,300,000 watt wind turbine. That's not all that impressive, that cat is well-known to be quite a menace, but I'll have to tell her about her new rank the next time she switches from purring at belly rubs to biting my hand.
Even in the global estimate of half a million birds killed by turbines per year, there are something like 50-90 billion birds on the planet, with an average lifespan of 2-5 years. Something like 20 billion birds die every year of various causes, if 0.0025% of those deaths are caused by 900 gigawatts of wind turbines that's OK.
If the proposed alternative to these turbines is not austerity but coal-fired power, the long-term climate effects of that are more deadly still.
There's a fair point about larger birds of prey who have smaller populations (and quite possibly longer breeding times).
I think it's a valid point, vs the isolated number of birds killed by turbines used as a reason against wind resource.
Also have to factor in the amount of deaths caused by air pollution, humans or otherwise.
Usually this argument exist in the framework of explaining how large wind turbines are actually industrial facilities with associated risks (among which killing birds, waste, need for concrete/infrastructure in agricultural land, ..) and not somehow "free" "green" or "renewable" energy. Modern "wind farms" have basically nothing to do with windmills or small-scale wind power like wind-powered water wells (which typically are used as direct power for mechanical or heat energy): they need global supply-chains and big companies.
When people try to point at the need for infrastructure for windmills as a risk or negative, and they leave out how much infrastructure is needed for the alternatives, it is a sneaky way to leave people with the impression that wind power has some kind of net negative or net risk, when often it’s a massive landslide of a net positive compared to what we will do if we don’t build the wind farm and get power some other way. The degrowth ecologists know this better than most of us.
As an example, the usual comparison brought up with birds getting killed is the number of birds killed by cats. We often don’t hear about the number of birds killed by oil spills. Deep water Horizon killed as many birds in a single spill as are killed globally in a year by wind turbines, and spills continue year after year. We don’t talk about the number of birds killed by power lines either.
So that's why, sure, wind or renewable (or even nuclear to some lesser extent) is better than fossil in some ways, but this in itself, in our current system, won't translate to much unless our prime effort goes to first maintain consumption at a steady level and then actually reduce it.
But i'm getting a bit off-topic! :)
That is a replacement though, when the alternative was something else. Yes I didn’t mean they tear down coal plants and put up turbines, but using the word “replace” is valid and accurate to discuss adding wind turbines instead of adding coal power, even if it’s in the future.
> most of the time we also keep the old ones running
This is true, and a good point. Hopefully what we’re talking about is phasing out the old ones over time, that it’s more of a slow dismantle than a permanent freeze of the existing infrastructure along with it’s existing environmental problems.
> then actually reduce it
Amen.
I don’t think that this is true. [0]
Actual total energy production from things like coal have stayed constant despite some countries, e.g. china, building out large amounts of new coal power plants. This is only possible if other plants have been taken offline.
Part of the reason they are shut down (not just environmental ones) is simply because they are more expensive to run than the alternatives.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
Letting them set the frame for the discussion and then following along is by no mean "getting ahead" it's simply playing their game.
I think what we may be disagreeing on is the nature of the weakness. I see this weakness as being inherently PR rather than being inherently about the birds.
So, yeah, turbines. Birds and turbines are one of those eco-theatre things.
Minimizing the issue would definitely be positive, but is also largely inconsequential in the big picture, and if such measures slow adoption it would even be harmful as pollution is an indirect cause of avian death.
Why are we even having a discussion about bird death from wind turbines? That's the important question.
It isn't because people and companies suddenly started caring more about animal deaths from electricity production. It's straight up FUD about renewable energy.
Articles like this, and discussion about bird deaths from turbines in general, frame the issues as something that must be talked about and discussed before installing wind turbines. As if the status quo is 0 environmental impact.
But it's not. The status quo is oil, fossil gas, and coal. All of which have a significantly higher environmental impact, by orders of magnitude, than however many birds do or do not get killed by wind turbines.
The next argument is the fiberglass waste, of which nobody gave 2 thoughts about the the fiberglass recreational boats that similarly don't break down made over the last 70 years.
This isn't even about the birds when you get down to it. Sure in a few areas with endangered species of birds, turbines can be an issue. Mostly though, it's about limiting the number of wind turbines installed. Some people hate turbines with a passion and protecting birds is an excuse to fight installation of new turbines.
For the wind turbines, maybe paint or restrict them in areas with endangered birds, but just accept that every now and then they are going to cut a seagull in half.
There's a whole food chain going on on the outskirts of cities, where you might occasionally find foxes.
There's a fox living in my neighbourhood and from the yapping and hissing at night it seems to be actively at war with the local cats.
To the contrary--I love the damage that cats do to rat/mouse/pigeon wildlife in my city (New York)! When I was visiting Athens on vacation, I noticed that there were thousands of wild cats that roamed the ruins; I wonder if, rather than seeing wild cats as an animal control problem, we should see them as a pest control measure?
Nobody wants that, but gas or nuclear could be a good alternative.
Someone more qualified than me can dissect this argument and crunch the data. Just mentioning it to illustrate that the "they kill birds!" argument might be more nuanced than you think.
Cats drive bird species to extinction all the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/04/invasive...
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198822110/australia-weighs-c...
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-australian-year-feral-cat-clos...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/asia/culling-curfew...
Also, https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/ | https://dariuszzdziebk.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/upload...
> Outdoor domestic cats are a recognized threat to global biodiversity. Cats have contributed to the extinction of 63 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles in the wild and continue to adversely impact a wide variety of other species, including those at risk of extinction, such as Piping Plover.
> The ecological dangers are so critical that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists domestic cats as one of the world’s worst non-native invasive species.
"The ecological dangers are so critical that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists humans as one of the world’s worst non-native invasive species."
Pretty believable! My take is it's always better to put one's house in order before trying to influence the behavior of others.
Have you tried painting your friend's cat? ;)
I've visited a wind farm and got a tour by one of the engineers who was involved with the permits and construction, and he told us that due to the population of several rare species of bats and birds, the turbine we were visiting couldn't operate at certain hours.
If painting one of the blades black could reduce the non-operation hours, that would be a significant win for the operators.
Tom and Jerry tried to warn us.
But I suspect you have a small number of cats that are just murder machines, some that eat birds to stay alive, and the vast majority of fat housecats that just eat chickens via a giant grinder at the pet food store.
I don't really know what's going on in other parts of the country. Are there stray cats just roaming the forests? I can't imagine why anyone would have incentive to exaggerate these numbers though.
> Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality.
So, we should start culling feral cats.
The statistic about extinct birds was done in Australia, and included foxes, stoats, rats, and other small mammals, as “alien predators” contributing to the killing of birds in Australia.
The number does sound high, and the paper acknowledges that, but I guess something published in Nature should be taken seriously.
I’ve only had time to barely skim it, but it appears that they might be saying the majority of the issue comes from un-owned cats that roam free, not cats that live with (and are fed by) humans in a house. I think they took data on the number of kills per cat and then multiplied by the estimated number of cats.
Edit: I also looked for rebuttals or critical review, and came across a defense of the paper by the same authors, which has references to the criticism: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-018-1796-y
They address multiple claims about misusing extrapolation in their defense article. I’m not defending them because I don’t know enough about this and it would take a long time to fully evaluate the methodology and criticisms. But, I really doubt this is as obvious or clear-cut as you suggest. It seems like a bad idea to jump to the conclusion that they’ve made the simplest of statistical mistakes and got it past the reviewers at Nature Comms. This journal is one of the more difficult to get into. The authors appear to have tried to be careful, and moreover they are at least using actual data, where the rest of us arm-chair commenters are basing our ideas off of beliefs and emotions and wishes for certain outcomes, which are all notoriously inaccurate, right?
Another thing we do know is that behaviors tend to lump into distributions (often Normal Distributions), and that given enough samples, we can make pretty strong claims about whole populations (as long as you’ve captured true representative samples). I did skim the paper enough to see that they put together probability distributions for the bird and other-mammal killing rates. They explicitly acknowledge a pretty wide range of feline hunting rates, no?
Less facetiously, it's interesting that the turbine birds are somehow more valuable or special. I would imagine that would be easy to prove, and I would expect to see a lot of "America-hating wind turbines murder 100,000 Bald Eagles a year" but for some reason I never see that.
Others have pointed out that there probably is a difference in the kinds of birds killed by cats vs wind turbines, but I've not seen any report breaking down the deaths by species (not that I've looked).
I imagine you'd place them in an area where there's almost always wind, otherwise you've planned poorly.
Currently, all the blades are the same color, so should expand and contract equally in the sunlight.
The wind patterns are already substantially affected by the collapsing of the polar vortex as the reflective ice cover in the Arctic decreases, reducing the (previously consistent) cycling of air around the globe. This is one of the major contributors to more severe weather.
All this to say: it's an interesting question, but I think it's already too late to wonder about any effect on "normal" wind. "Normal" wind is a thing of the past.
All of those things may be true, but I disagree that it's not worth figuring out. I mean, if we're greenwashing everything--I just bought carbon-neutral coffee tf is that--we might as well do the math here.
This is just like how we raced to ping whales to death. Like, let's game out one move ahead.
This one for example mentions in the abstract that by using an amount of turbines collectively making up 300 GW of capacity, it could severely reduce wind speeds of a hurricane: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120
300 GW is 2/3 of the power consumption of the entire US and you would need all of those in a small-ish area just to dampen, not fully absorb, a catastrophic storm's energy. Even after those wind speed reductions, there is very strong wind.
If you scatter those turbines in a larger area, you can imagine that the effect will be much more diluted. There is so much energy in the atmosphere that we won't put much of a dent in it with our current energy consumption.
Some of the air movement due to high and low pressure and humidity and turbulence becomes infrared radiation (heat) due to mechanical friction and presumably also due to turbulence and convection causing friction in the air.
The answer is that it would take a lot and is dwarfed by GHG climate change.
I said nothing about wind vs petro/coal. But we're at a point where we've decided that we've taken petro too far, and it changed the climate, so we need to replace it with something else. We're rolling out something new, but I'm not seeing a lot of activity on addressing the potential for the new thing to change the climate.
"Although large-scale effects are observed, wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature."
Hmm. Is that the de facto measure of bad climate change?
But, seriously again, isn't that a weird thing to examine in this study? The researchers hypothesize that wind turbines might increase the surface temperature, and they found that they do not. Great.
I don't know why anyone would look to examine that, since they produce negligible GHG.
If I were examining it, I would look at stuff like how much wind energy getting removed changes things that are contingent on wind.
Now, try to imagine a wind farm tall enough and dense enough to meaningfully impede the flow of air driven by rotation and pressure/temperature differences on the surface of the planet you are looking at.
Next, take a guess as to whether such wind turbines are likely to be built under any circumstances.
So the "tallest and most dense wind farms are long past being completely invisible" means that they are so large as to be visible even from space?
> imagine a wind farm tall enough and dense enough to meaningfully impede the flow of air
Right. This is begging the question.
> whether such wind turbines are likely to be built
Exactly what I'm asking.
As you ascend, the tallest wind farms cease to become visible at about 30-40 miles of altitude. At that point you still have more 200 miles to ascend before reaching the low end of low earth orbit. So by the time you reach LEO, you are long past the point where wind farms became invisible.
> This is begging the question.
I am proposing you attempt to visualize the scale of things involved in your question, and that such a visualization ought to make the answer very clear. If the question were "at what point does my box fan collection affect the climate in my zip code" I would answer in a similar way.
The research posted in this thread concludes that there is a non-negligible effect on climate. It certainly sounds like you have arrived the opposite conclusion, but as you've left it as exercise to me, I can't be sure.
The reason that CO2 has such an oversized impact is that it accumulates in the atmosphere. Wind turbines offset CO2 emissions, and potentially help absorb a little bit of energy. They seem far more likely to reduce or slow the CO2 caused climate change than to cause any direct effects.
There is a paper showing very local surface temperatures going up slightly in the immediate downwind area of some turbines. This doesn’t affect global temperatures, nor air temperatures, but there may be some minor measureable effects very close to turbines.
I asked because it occurred to me that it could. Then, someone pointed me to the paper (linked in this thread) and the researchers say so: "Large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer" and "very large amounts of wind power can produce nonnegligible climatic change"
Whether or not that change is a problem is the next step of the process.
CO2 doesn't have anything to do with this situation, because wind turbines don't produce much CO2.
We probably have several orders of magnitude more turbulence in the air due to cities and airplanes and other man made structures than turbines.
CO2 absolutely has everything to do with this, because you asked about climate change. CO2 is one of the things use of turbines is intended to reduce. You can’t ask a question about climate change and proceed to ignore CO2. CO2 emissions are reduced when coal plants are replaced with turbines. If you want to have any idea of the affect of turbines on climate change, you must account for the relative changes in CO2, and it’s likely to be larger than whatever effects turbulence cause.
If you are interested in what turbulence can do to the climate, then it’s also important to ask the question what has already happened due to deforestation. Does the introduction of turbines have any chance of compensating for the number of trees we’re removed from exposure to surface winds?
What am I supposed to say?
> CO2 absolutely has everything to do with this
In fact, it's not. The climate is not comprised entirely of CO2. You're so wrapped up in the unrelated issue of CO2 that you're not addressing the actual question. My question is "can wind turbines provoke climate change?" It's not "how is wind better than coal?" Why not ask "how do wind turbines reduce atmospheric H2O?"
It's ridiculous. This is a reasonable thing to consider. If there is no material effect, or if there is a mitigation, then we're golden. But I'm hearing "you're so dumb for even thinking that, and have you even seen them from space, and what about coal?" Well fuck me for asking then.
> Does the introduction of turbines have any chance of compensating for the number of trees we’re removed from exposure to surface winds?
Let's ask that question. I don't know why we should conflate those two things, but yeah, what has deforestation done to the climate?
It’s not possible to answer your question about turbines and climate without talking about CO2, so if you refuse to discuss CO2, then... CO2 is the known cause of current climate change. I didn’t ask if wind is better than coal (answer:yes). The pre-supposed answer to your question by many people is that use of turbines will cause positive changes to the climate due to their ability to reduce CO2. Will that be offset by warming caused by turbulence? Personally I doubt it, but maybe.
Deforestation is, as I understand it, contributing to warming, among other environmental negatives. It also removes turbulence causing obstacles from the boundary layer of air at the same time that turbines are adding some. Why wouldn’t you worry about tree turbulence, if you’re going to worry about wind turbine turbulence?
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/how-harmful-is-renewable-...
> According to the data, while solar* is estimated to cause 1,000 to 28,000 bird deaths annually, and wind 140,000 to 328,000, coal kills far more – about 7.9 million birds a year
That's thirty times more birds killed by coal than the upper estimate of birds killed by wind turbines.
* "solar" being concentrated solar power, which is quite uncommon. PV panels do not cause significant avian deaths.
For anyone about to suggest this is because there is more coal than wind: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1943815X.2012.7...
> It estimates that wind farms are responsible for roughly 0.27 avian fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while nuclear power plants involve 0.6 fatalities per GWh and fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 9.4 fatalities per GWh
Study link: https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/contextualizing...
More data from the Sierra Club, showing wind turbines are the least of problems birds face: https://www.sierraclub.org/michigan/wind-turbines-and-birds-...
I'm surprised nuclear has higher deaths, but I also feel like any large structure will cause avian deaths one way or another.
The comment you're responding to is asking for bird deaths / W (power output). This,
> 0.27 avian fatalities per GWh for wind, 9.4 avian fatalities per GWh for coal.
Is birth deaths / J (energy output), essentially. It's not accounting for that there's roughly 30 times as much coal generation as there is wind generation. I've put a comment elsewhere that computes the /W numbers: coal is slightly better than wind at not killing birds. The core comment stands — the issue with wind is blown out of proportion — but the stats justifying it should account for the amount of generation.
Edit: no, maybe I'm wrong here. I've not had the morning's coffee yet. While the unit is funny choice, … it should be fine. But the math doesn't check out with the first article's numbers. Table 1 from your article with the GWh numbers should contain the data I need, but the site is broken such that I cannot access table 1. So, like, these either grossly contradict the article … or something's amiss.
Edit 2: yeah, I think you do want GWh; you have to involve time somewhere, as it's a rate of bird deaths that's calculated. I think the first article's per-annum deaths is what is giving me a headache here, since it's sort of an implied rate in a lot of the writing. So /GWh works … but the math still needs to check out, which it does not appear to.
In 2009, wind power gen was ~275 TWh, coal was 7817 TWh.[1] There's roughly a 30x difference between those.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds
“A 2012 study found that wind projects kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, compared to 9.36 birds killed per gigawatt-hour of electricity from fossil fuel projects.” And things have continued to improve.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-wind?ta...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-coal?ta...
PS: Coal was 40.5% in 2014, so the drop is only 12% in 8 years which isn’t massive but it is still significant.
... Hold on, are you suggesting that it's uncertain whether wind turbines work, or something?
I assume 99% of birds die of other causes.
What are the populations and breeding rates of the birds killed by cats vs the birds killed by wind turbines?
I would say that anyone who is not looking at that data and is attempting to frame it as cats are worse so who cares is being disingenuous.
What I remember is that Wind turbines are build in large open fields that make good habitats for prey as well as creating thermals for them to lift on.
If my memory is correct, that means that wind turbines create a trap that draws in apex species by presenting them with what appears to be the ideal hunting ground and then kills them by presenting a hazard that they can not adapt to.
I have nothing against wind turbines, I rather enjoy them.
But as an aside, I think that the proponents do not listen to those who do have complains (i.e. shadows of the blades on houses, noise) and label them as NIMBY where the same groups have no issue in playing up less rational complaints about nuclear sites. I think it is a disingenuous tactic to bring up cats in the argument as they are not related to the discussion. It is similar to if we were debating Nuclear Power and I bring up that "More people drown in dam reservoirs and rivers". Sure, it is a great thing to know that I am more at risk of drowning but that does not do anything about the concerns of Nuclear Power.
Edit: Anther user has also heard the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481309
There are just like, a lot of birds, and they reproduce quite quickly.
[1] https://bioone.org/journals/the-condor/volume-116/issue-1/CO...
So, taking the numbers for wind from the article,
In [2]: 328_000 / 35
Out[2]: 9371.42857142857
The article lacks a generation number for coal. Looking it up in [1] it's 3748 TWh/year (sigh…) or 892 GW. Taking the bird deaths per year number from the article, that gives us:
In [1]: 7_900_000 / 892
Out[1]: 8856.502242152466
And we should still replace coal with wind, of course.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-coal?tab=tabl...
> For anyone about to suggest this is because there is more coal than wind: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1943815X.2012.7...
> > It estimates that wind farms are responsible for roughly 0.27 avian fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while nuclear power plants involve 0.6 fatalities per GWh and fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 9.4 fatalities per GWh
Something is wrong here, then. If we use those numbers, and use the generation numbers for 2009 from [1], we get ~74,250 deaths due to wind, and ~73,479,800 deaths due to coal. These numbers are an order of magnitude off the first article's absolute death numbers, too low for wind and too high for coal.
"Listen, cats kill millions of birds each year. So a few more die in tailings ponds?"
Not saying either should get a pass; companies installing wind turbines should be held to the same standard and not off just because they are "renewable"[0]
[0] Even the fact we consider wind/solar "renewable" is evidence of how slick the marketing campaigns are for these companies. Solar panels and wind turbines have limited life spans, require rare earth metals that have to be mined. Solar and wind energy are renewable but how we harvest that energy is decidedly NOT renewable.
"renewable" is clearly an approximation here, as there is no truly renewable energy source in the sense that it doesn't need any equipment or infrastructure that could degrade over time. Just like "rechargeable" batteries aren't infinitely rechargeable.
But there are studies that look at the whole-lifecycle impact of wind and solar and find them better than most alternatives. Certainly better than oil, coal and natural gas.
Much human activity negatively impacts wildlife - we should be pragmatic in addressing these problems, and the harm to wildlife from renewable energy is significantly less than the harm caused by fossil fuel energy.
The ENERGY is "renewable", not the generation equipment. Nobody calls gas powerplants non-renewable because of the blades in the turbine.
C'mon man.
Worldwide, around 7 billion male chicks are culled each year in the egg industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
The most interesting solution I came across was using LED lights [2] to match ambient colors of the sky. Here’s the description from the prototype creator:
I built a scale prototype using a foam core silhouette of a wind turbine as seen from land. The structure was covered in LED Tape lights and linked to a potentiometer to control their brightness. I installed the turbine along the San Francisco beach and powered it using a car battery. After some quick adjustments, the silhouette vanished into the background sky.
I think this solution, combined with some kind of flashing ultraviolet signal (as birds can see UV, IIRC) is the best route for both birds and humans.
1. https://onthearts.com/p/are-wind-turbines-ugly-could-they
2. http://www.taismauk.com/#/camouflage-for-offshore-wind-turbi...
It's literally not an issue. They are industrial pieces of machinery, which probably work better if we don't handicap them with some asinine requirement to "look good", which is an unworkable requirement since plenty of people ALREADY think they look wonderful and would look worse if changed.
We should not let a bunch of NIMBYs crying about stuff not even on their property or neighborhood who are just pitching a fit about any change stop us from undoing the impending climate catastrophe we have created for ourselves by refusing to do anything that the dumbest and angriest people seem to be upset about. Wind turbine adoption is driven at the ballot box, not in the hearts and minds of a bunch of selfish people.
Ok. What about spinning or lighted designs in a rotating fan display? I cannot for the life of me figure out what it's called, but when the fan blade spins it makes a pretty design that is visible to birds, but also perhaps pleasing to people.
No.
I'm only partially joking, unfortunately.
/? eyes on things at the airport birds https://www.google.com/search?q=eyes+on+things+at+the+airpor...
"Wide-eyed glare scares raptors: From laboratory evidence to applied management" (2018) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Raptors (birds) > Common names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_of_prey
IIRC Festo has some of the longer flight times with their animal-inspired drones?
Would a covered charging dock/cradle for an autonomous or semi-autonomous bird-saving system would save [wind turbine] owners money?
"Never landing drone: Autonomous soaring of a unmanned aerial vehicle in front of a moving obstacle” (2023) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17568293211060... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1139887687601566150...
"Orographic"; Orographic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orography
Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator
I suppose it would still be "bladeless" to have a giant duct - larger than the diameter of contemporary windmill blades - that redirect flow to a turbine in the base, but that would effectively be a giant bird blender.
So no, not really.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257648
More seriously though it should be possible to use LEDs just bright enough to deter birds while also not totally annoy most humans. At that point light pollution and insects might still become a problem though.
Definitely more resources than building a few hundred nuclear power plants, but way way less wasteful than doing nothing and/or building more fossil plants.