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Environment/Energy

Violent Environmental Problems With Wind Turbine Operation

wind farm palm springsRenewable energy wind turbines as electricity sources possess extreme environmental problems not found in its renewable energy rival–solar photovoltaic.  These problems are due to rotation during operation of 130-foot or more long, thirteen-ton turbine blades with tip speeds of 200 miles per hour.

An unavoidable problem of wind turbines is killing flying creatures.  The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) has produced a video “Eagle lawsuit ruffles wind industry feathers.” The video records an eagle being killed by a wind turbine.  It appears the eagle went back for a second look at the turbine and a blade struck the fatal blow.  Possibly the eagle thought the turbine was a bigger bird.

 A companion article by CFACT is “Wind turbines kill up to 39 million birds a year” by wildlife expert Jim Wiegand.  Details of studies on bird fatalities caused by wind turbines are cited in this article.

 It has been long known wind turbines are devastating to bat populations.  A U. S. Geological Survey Report “Bat Fatalities at Wind Turbines: Investigating the Causes and Consequences“ mentions thousands of bats are killed annually at wind turbine sites around the world.  Besides being minced by turbine blade rotations, bats are subject to deaths by other means as explained by the August 26, 2008 Scientific American article “On a Wing and Low Air: The Surprising Way Wind Turbines Kill Bats.”

Bats are killed by pressure pulses causing burst blood vessels in their lungs.  Due to these deaths being caused by remote features of wind turbine operations and bats very small body weights, bat carcasses may be located large distances from offending wind turbines and never found.  As nocturnal creatures, bats are particularly vulnerable to wind turbines because their operations are frequently late at night when demand for electricity is at its lowest.

 In another article by CFACT, “Greens work to still wind, darken solar power projects” by Professor Larry Bell is cited several examples where environmental groups like the Audubon Society and Sierra Club have stopped wind projects due to massive bird kills anticipated by wind turbines.  According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the United States had at the end of 2012 more than 60,000 Megawatts of wind turbine output supplied by 45,000 turbines.

The majority of wind turbines are located in vast agriculture areas of the United States stretching from Texas to Canada.  The estimate of 39 million annual bird fatalities by Jim Wiegand may be a gross underestimate.  Bats devour insects and their loss in agriculture areas may have devastating impacts on future agriculture production.

 Other environmental problems of wind turbines are their influence on humans.  Effects of long-term exposure to low-amplitude pressure pulses unnoticed by humans may be a future problem.  In addition are sound pulses at about 20 cycles per minute matching turbine’s speed of rotation.   Long term health effects from these disturbances can’t be known.

 Other problems with wind turbines are they catch on fire and explode.  In 2011, an upper New York state wind turbine exploded and spread debris for 1/4 mile. Pictures of wind turbine fires in Texas and other locations are found here.  Additional problems are winter ice forming on blades.  Spinning turbine blades have thrown refrigerator-size pieces of ice hundreds of yards.

Wind turbines should be subjected to the same Maximum Credible Accident (MCA) critera imposed on nuclear power plants.  The MCA for a nuclear plant is a Loss-of Coolant-Accident (LOCA) in which reactor coolants stop flowing and reactor cores are subject to melting due overheating.

 The MCA for a wind turbine is a 13-ton turbine blade snaps off during operation and the blade is hurtled possibly one-half mile.  If the blade lands in a local high school football stadium during Homecoming, thousands could be killed before the 13-ton blade comes to rest.  Exclusion zones surrounding wind turbines need to be established to protect the public from injury.  A smaller scale injury is individuals being struck by decapitated eagles or similar flying creatures.

 These are a few violent environmental problems with wind turbines unknown to solar photovoltaics.  Like solar energy, additional environmental assessments need to be made about wind turbines energy requirements to build  and install them in comparison to energy output during operating lifetimes.  Environmental effects of acquiring rare earth metals for generator magnets, large quantities of fiberglass and other metals, and vast amounts of concrete for turbine bases need evaluated.  Like solar energy, the intermittent operation of wind turbines require fast responding fossil fuel electricity sources to maintain continuity of electricity supply.  Poor performance of backup electricity supply may reduce or even eliminate wind turbine’s savings of fossil fuel use.

 Like solar photovoltaics, wind turbines are expected to have a practical operating lifetime of around 25 years.  What happens to wind turbines no longer useable?  Will the country be strewn by unsightly landscapes of tall towers with dangling turbine blades?  This is a view of thousands of still wind turbines shown on I-10 west of Palm Springs, CA that I visited years ago.  Whether they been torn down today I am unaware.

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James H. Rust

— James H. Rust

James H. Rust is a policy advisor for The Heartland Institute, a retired professor of nuclear engineering, and an outspoken critic of unnecessary alarmism over man-made global warming. He funds several scholarships for students majoring in chemical engineering at Purdue University. He currently is delivering a talk titled “America's Failed Energy Policies and The Reason Why.”

  • Jim Wiegand

    I recently reviewed a bogus mortality study handed to me by some
    very concerned citizens. Looking at the factors and flaws of the study,
    in
    my opinion there was a kill rate of 500-600 fatalities per MW per Year.
    The bogus study claimed only about 6 percent of this figure. I believe
    an investigative story is going to hit soon about this pitiful study and
    explain how most of the mortality was hidden. Watch for it.

    • harryhammer

      Mr. Wiegand, are you a cat-lover?

      According to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, domestic cats kill billions of birds, mice and small animals in the U.S. each year:

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/30/domestic-cats-kill-billions-mice-birds-annually-study_n_2575833.html

      Given that you’re such a bird-lover, why aren’t you outraged?

    • harryhammer

      Attention Mr. Bird-lover, those highlighted lines are called links.

      What did you think of the videos?

      Did you even bother to have a look?

      • Jim Wiegand

        I have seen the links. They were put out by ignorant desk nerds. I have found that any data from wind industry studies is meaningless because the methodology is flawed or rigged. It has been this way with every study I have ever reviewed. Here is another example of fraud that fools the desk nerds.

        The FWS and the wind industry have their “NO Net LOSS” game they are playing with the public. This game was created in Washington. First they get bogus population surveys done so the population is estimated many times over. Then they come in and say something like this….we expect the project to kill only 10-20 eagles a year. But this is such a low percentage that the overall population will not be affected by the few eagles killed.

        Planners actually fall for this nonsense. The reality of this game is that it is nothing close to “no net loss”, especially since the majority of turbine fatalities goes unreported (golden eagles in Texas) and wind turbines have a several thousand mile mortality footprint.

  • Jim Wiegand

    This is for Harry below and the many other fools that believe the 30
    years of fraud and bogus science that has been produced by the wind
    industry.
    I have decades of wildlife
    observations in the field and this is the way it is with cats. Cats in remote locations are eaten and killed by the native species. With bobcats, coyotes, Mt lions, and eagles around cats do not have a chance. In all my years with many thousands of hours of wilderness observations in remote locations, I have never seen one feral cat, EVER. But I have seen plenty of these cat killers and cats that wander too far from the safety of communities disappear. So not only can these species easily kill a cat, they can out-compete
    them with their survival skills.

    The primary bird problem with cats is in their association with people. Even then the feral cats depend on people and communities. This is where they find their food and shelter away from these other species. This is also where they do their damage to birds and it can be
    significant. But these cats do not primarily eat birds. They will eat mice, rats, large insects, forage at dumps, trash bins, and even steal left over dog food from back yards. They also eat bird species which are strongly associated with people, those being English sparrows, pigeons, and starlings. A feral cat’s diet is in no way a threat or problem with many specialized species like shrikes, eagles and hawks, owls, falcons, cranes that live in remote locations.
    This is where the wind turbines do most of their killing.

    There is another factor in all of this besides these other species eating feral cats, they have
    territories. They may be in the range of 5-10 square miles or even a hundred with a Mt. lion. In this same hundred square miles there could be over a 500 Mw of wind energy installments with over 90,000,000 cubic feet of spinning turbine blades.

    The turbine vs. cat debate was made for fools. It is meaningless BS created from behind a desk for the purpose of hiding a terrible mortality problem associated with wind turbines. It is the turbines that are slaughtering every indigenous bird species birds in their remote locations, not feral cats. Feral cats also eat very few bats, again for all the same reasons.