Or to apples to apples it killed by coal for that matter. It is a bizzare mental blindspot that people never ask that question - but birds always seem to come up mainly as NIMBY pretexts anyway.
Birds are also highly affected by air pollution. I would be surprised if coal-fired plants are not mass bird killers just like they kill hundreds of thousands of humans every year.
I've always been suspect of the 'kills birds' argument. I lived near some turbines on an extremely windy coast, and never EVER saw any dead birds anywhere near it.
Daily cleaning up the evidence with ruthless efficiency or just FUD by the NIMBYs?
Although blade strikes are easy to diagnose as a killer of birds, I'm sure the pollution released by coal/oil/gas power plants kills many birds too, not to mention all the other wildlife and humans.
This is a problem blown far out of proportion by those opposed to wind power who scream blue-bloody-murder about a few birds killed by turbines while ignoring the much greater number of birds killed by pollution from coal plants those wind turbines are replacing.
> 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.
> 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
The article does mention that in passing, though not specifically coal but power lines. It also mentions that house cats literally kill billions of birds a year.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, it's just a simple case of "follow the money". The fossil fuel industry is a trillion dollar per year business and their interest is to keep it this way. So poisoning the well is a good strategy for them. If you thought about it, it was clear the bird argument was always just a talking point nimby types were fed with, so they have something alarming to repeat and to get outraged, without really caring if it's true. The only thing they cared about is not having wind turbines because of their (weird?) aesthetic preferences and desires to have things stay the same forever. Ironically the bird and animal population overall are struggling with the way things are now and how they want to keep it. But again, they don't really care about that.
I also wonder how many birds die from things associated with other forms of power (eg. burning coal)?
Naturally this would have to be scaled based on power output (maybe?), and of course it would be harder to find the bodies and determine cause of death, but it's not like these other sources of power are clean compared to wind as far as birds are concerned. I guess it's just easier to guess what killed a bird whose body is next to a turbine...
Bird deaths per year is a meaningless stat — coal could easily be generating more bird deaths per year because it simply dwarfs wind in power generation. You want that in birds deaths / GW.
So, taking the numbers for wind from the article,
In [2]: 328_000 / 35
Out[2]: 9371.42857142857
9.3k birds / GW.
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
So coal and wind are roughly comparable, with coal being marginally better at not killing birds. Which, TBH, I did not expect. Even so, the problem then with wind is still blown out of proportion.
And we should still replace coal with wind, of course.
> > 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.
It’s not like fossil fuel pollution is benign to wildlife.
Does it really make sense to call bird deaths from power lines “wind turbine related” just because those power lines serve wind turbines? You’d still need them if you used another source of energy.
Wind power kills fewer birds per unit energy than coal, and it kills orders of magnitude fewer birds than domestic cats, which we're apparently fine with.
Plus, the big growth in wind power will probably be offshore: there's more wind and fewer NIMBYs there. There is also a lower density of birds.
Not trying to pick a fight but just posting because I hear this often from my friends, re birds being happy.
The choice, if between coal-fired plants and windmills should be pretty obvious to birds. Sure we may not see them getting splashed to bits with coal-fired plants but they are silently getting ill/dying over time.
The main killers of birds are: Cats, cars, glass windows, power lines and pesticides. The amount of birds killed by wind power is tiny in comparison. NIMBYs like to abuse this argument to avoid building wind farms while not caring for birds at all.
This is a fairly minor issue that the planners are usually required to mitigate as much as possible, and the non-renewable sources have a significant cost to bird habitats as well. The various bird protection societies are usually cautiously in favour of wind power provided it's not in a sensitive habitat.
It turns out that glass-windowed skyscrapers and domestic cats are far more deadly to birds.
Monocultural wheat fields are also a highly artificial industrial landscape, just a more familiar one.
No. I've seen the statistics for how many birds are estimated to be killed by human-made objects.
Buildings were the biggest killer of birds by far. Many millions of birds each year are killed by colliding with windows on buildings. They often don't realize the window is there. I'm guessing the bird sees through the window and doesn't realize there's a barrier or they see a reflection of the sky instead.
Automobiles were also big killers of birds.
Windmills were estimated to result in 0.1% of bird deaths by man-made objects or something really tiny like that.
I don't understand why people freak out about birds being killed by wind turbines when vastly larger numbers are being killed by buildings and cars. Nobody is yelling about saving the birds by getting rid of buildings and cars.
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