Breaking WIND: windmills vs. the birds
Part of what an energy conference teaches professionals is how to successfully control industry PR, defend its image, etc. Just as mining companies must know how to make themselves not look like environmental monsters for removing mountaintops, wind power developers have to know how to answer questions from animal rights groups who argue that turbine kill large numbers of birds. The young and idealistic wind industry wants to proceed sustainably, developing farms in safe areas and backing up its practices with peer reviewed studies that tabulate the exact impact on birds and bats. Hopefully, they can achieve this panacea. According to the DOE, the 20% by 2030 initiative is going to require 75,000 more turbines and $60B worth of new transmission lines -- so even though the impacts may not be great per turbine, the overall impact is going to be substantial.
Seminars citing a new NYSERDA study were revealed today, assessing the wildlife impacts of wind turbines on wildlife. As almost everyone expected, wind power has the lowest impact on wildlife of any other major energy sources. To be blunt, wind farms have not yet been linked with any major impact on wildlife populations. The highest level of wildlife risks is defined as 'major effects on population,' which almost all forms of energy (aside from wind and nuclear) create at one of the 6 stages of energy production:
- Extraction
- Transportation
- Construction
- Generation
- Transmission
- Decomission
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