Nevada Ivanpah Solar Plant Accidentally Incinerates Up to 6k Birds a Year (2016)
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
But in context, crashing into glass buildings kills about 600 million birds a year.
Cats? About 2.4 BILLION bird kills a year.
Not quite a fair comparison.
So it’s what ~1,000x as bad as the average structure but we’re talking about something several times the size of the average single family home. Plop down a housing development on those same 3,500 acres and it’s likely to kill far more birds.
Do you actually believe that? It seems obvious that single family homes don’t kill birds en masse.
Plop down 3500 acres of glass office towers and we’ll talk.
It’s uncommon with small windows, but a glass sliding door or big picture window regularly gets a thump. Some get back up, but many don’t.
I do live in an area with a lot of birds so that may be a major factor.
More than that, the solar plant itself is an entirely unnecessary addition. Photovoltaic cells were already viable in 2014. Other net-zero CO2 power options are also available, though wind turbines frequently suffer the same problem.
This plant exists to feel good about the energy it produces, and being able to sit around and watch it immolate protected species every day cuts against that goal.
The interesting thing about Ivanpah is that it's both generation and storage. It's probably a technological dead end, but that is not an absolutely sure thing now and it certainly wasn't obvious a decade ago. Batteries have come a long way in that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect
- "In one study, respondents were asked how much they were willing to pay to prevent migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds by covering the oil ponds with protective nets. Subjects were told that either 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 migrating birds were affected annually, for which subjects reported they were willing to pay $80, $78 and $88 respectively.[2] Other studies of willingness-to-pay to prevent harm have found a logarithmic relationship or no relationship to scope size.[3]"
~30mil/year from power lines.
~300mil/year from cars/trucks hitting them.
6000 is nothing.
Whenever someone talks about how alternative energy kills a bunch of birds, you know they're a pretty dumb person who can't be bothered with context.
> What was once the world’s largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening... “The Ivanpah plant was a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster,” Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club said in an email. “Along with killing thousands of birds and tortoises, the project’s construction destroyed irreplaceable pristine desert habitat along with numerous rare plant species,” Dowell said. “While the Sierra Club strongly supports innovative clean energy solutions.. Ivanpah demonstrated that not all renewable technologies are created equal.”
1. That plant produces ~392 megawatts in^h^ while ~6000 bird deaths occur, meaning ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird.
2. One ton of coal can give you ~21 gigajoules in a coal plant, or ~665 watts over the course of a year.
3. So the same output for a coal plant means burning ~98 tons of coal per bird.
4. Unknown: Does mining and burning ~98 tons of coal will lead to >1 bird deaths?
If the answer is yes, then the solar thermal plant is--on average--killing fewer birds. (Specific sub-populations near it are another story.)
It produces 640 gigawatt-hours in a year. Power in a year doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make its nameplate power all day long.
> ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird.
This is incoherent.
BTW, Wikipedia says the annual net output is 856 GWh, so it’s 143 MWh per bird killed. You’ve forgotten about capacity factor.
It would be nice if we used energy as the main unit and energy/time for power like in SI. Rates seem to be more intuitive than integrals.
It automatically sounds as if it involves watts, hours, or even watts per hour, but it's actually none of those things. It's just (joules * 3600), where that fixed multiplier comes from a quirk of history in how we subdivided our clocks.
My advice? Whenever you see it, replace it with "jumbojoules", as in "I used 87 kilo-jumbojoules running that appliance this month."
The "year" aspect comes into play for taking "solar-fried birds per year" (given to us) and "coal burned per year" (calculated from wattage) and then canceling out the year, leaving us with "solar-fried birds per coal".
> you should consider avoiding all the weird scaling and working in units of energy [...] the annual net output is 856 GWh
You're the one doing weird stuff here: Even as you say to use units of energy, you are actually using a unit of power, since "annually" means per-year! Choosing to use cursed units (1 watt-hours vs 3600 joules) just makes it even harder to realize what's going on because the word "hour" is hanging out there as a red-herring.
> capacity factor
Fair enough, I inserted Wikipedia's value for planned/rated level of operation, rather than the much-reduced level it was actually operating under for various reasons.
Yes, but they have different capacity factors. That is, the solar plant is not producing power at night, but your calculation gives it credit for it.
It's best to just keep sane units; e.g. say this plant generates 3 petajoules each year, and kills 6000 birds/year, so it kills one bird per 500 gigajoules.
A coal plant is about 33% efficient, and coal has about 30MJ/kg of specific energy; so we get about 10MJ of electrical energy/kg. So each 50,000 kg of coal mined and burnt would produce the same amount of energy that Ivanpah does between killing birds.
This is simply not true. Very few power plants work like that, and Ivanpah is definitely an exception. (This is why the capacity factor isn’t 100%.)
> > capacity factor
> Fair enough, I inserted Wikipedia's value for planned/rated level of operation, rather than the much-reduced level it was actually operating under for various reasons.
No, and you might consider reading the article on capacity factor (and don’t stop at the first paragraph - read the section on renewables). If you put 1kW of solar panels on your roof, you are not getting 1kW times 1 year of energy every year — not even close.
And you are replying to my objection to:
> ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird.
If Ivanpah could kill a bird, once, to produce 65 kW forever, that would be an unbelievably good tradeoff. But, of course, that’s not what Ivanpah does, and saying that years somehow enter the mix later on doesn’t make this statement any more coherent.
I meant definitely not an exception.
> Very few power plants work like that
And most "napkin math" refers to a simplified calculation with rough guesses made in an impromptu or amateur fashion, like using a pen to write with no options nearby except a disposable paper napkin.
> > canceling out the year
> If Ivanpah could kill a bird, once, to produce 65 kW forever
The context is to get ratios between (A) scope/benefit as indicated by wattage and (B) birds-deaths, and (C) coal-used. If you double the activity of each plant, you can expect one to double the fried-birds, and the other to double the coal-needed.
It feels like I'm comparing dollars-costs of running electric versus gasoline engines of the same "horsepower", and you're unsatisfied because "a gallon of gasoline can't burn forever."
> > Very few power plants work like that
> And most "napkin math" refers to a simplified calculation with rough guesses
Assuming that it's always high noon when you're talking about solar power plants is more than a little rough for napkin math.
> The context is to get ratios between (A) scope/benefit as indicated by wattage and (B) birds-deaths
I give up. The wattage of a power plant is its benefit per unit time, and bird deaths are a detriment not per unit time.
and (B) birds-deaths, and (C) coal-used. If you double the activity of each plant, you can expect one to double the fried-birds, and the other to double the coal-needed.
While it's true that my napkin-math uses it's planned max output, this correction is not accurate either: That figure seems to refer to only a portion of the generators running on the site, and it also involves contracts rather than what was delivered.
Instead let's look at Wikipedia's the "Production" > "Ivanpah total" for the year 2022, which is 769,164 MWh across that year. Convert to joules, divide by the seconds in a year, and that's an average output of 87.74 megawatts.
That's down by a factor of ~4.47x from my original napkin-math, so we can just apply it to the coal-amount, giving us a revised "Is mining and burning ~21.9 tons of coal gonna kill a bird?"
Very unlikely. 100 tonnes of coal is order of magnitude one excavator scoop.
This thing probably kills 600 a week. Or at least monthly.
Crescent Dunes invented the algorithm for focus that prevents birdkills. And it had thermal energy storage, the first tower CSP at utility scale to do so, which removes the need to keep the heliostats always on standby focused together on one spot. Ivanpah was the last CSP built with no storage, and since then no bird kills. All 30 projects in China have been required to include storage.
Crescent Dunes (100 MW) had other problems as the first ever Tower CSP with storage at utility scale (Gemasolar had been built with storage a few years earlier in Spain, at 50 MW. Crescent Dunes had a major outage because a tank leaked, bankrupting the startup that developed it, but now its owned by a big Spanish outfit and has been back online for several years, supplying night solar to Las Vegas: https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes...
By the way, I’m happy to find someone with CSP knowledge on HN. Are you working in the field?
I presume there is video of the aftermath ("workers have nicknamed the smouldering birds "streamers", because they leave tiny wisps of white smoke behind as they burn up in the sky.") of the incinerated birds here: https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-de...
I wondered when I saw it - is that glow the air turning into plasma? Are otherwise-invisible dust particles reflecting the absurd amount of light hitting them? Is the heat enough for the air to start scattering light?
It's no surprise that it would incinerate birds, in any case.
It seems to be a design issue that impacts most of these solar thermal plants without much of a solution.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/11-years-after-celebrate...
https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b...
It had lots of flaws (environmental impact and animal life). Ultimately technology moved ahead of its capabilities.
I’m glad we tried an idea. Not all will make it, and that’s ok!
> The good news for the roadrunners is that the Ivanpah team says it plans on adding 'roadrunner doors' to the fences so they can easily hop through, instead of getting trapped.
Trying not to laugh. They should just paint the door on...
> Birds in the sky, on the other hand, are a little more complicated, because how do you stop a bird from flying wherever it wants?
They better pray no eagle wanted to take a break over there in these 10+ years or they might be criminal in US law :)
Acme, but better.
We are allowed to talk about concepts, topics and news worthy articles and not take any action to change it. Conversation around topics isn't limited only to those that advance solutions to such things. I never claimed to care enough about the article to take any personal or professional level of interest to change the outcome.
I am simply here for discussion on the article, not to change those outcomes and I am sure neither are you.
With your logic, the 40k road deaths aren't important for discussion either because 700k American's die of heart disease each year.
But hey, let's not allow people to have other conservation efforts.