Category: Bird Fryers

Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

Obvious to some, but here is a great essay.

“As for house cats, they don’t kill big, rare, threatened birds. “

“In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds never evolved to deal with.

Solar farms have similarly large ecological impacts. Building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife.

In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.”

As we were learning of these impacts, it gradually dawned on me that there was no amount of technological innovation that could solve the fundamental problem with renewables.

You can make solar panels cheaper and wind turbines bigger, but you can’t make the sun shine more regularly or the wind blow more reliably. I came to understand the environmental implications of the physics of energy. In order to produce significant amounts of electricity from weak energy flows, you just have to spread them over enormous areas. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.

Read it all at Quillette.

 

 

 

I’m Pretty Sure Wood Has Carbon In It

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

From a DRAX news release

12th November 2018

The findings were revealed in analysis from Oxford Economics looking at the economic impact of Drax’s UK operations, which includes Selby-based Drax Power Station.

The power station, which employs around 900 people, has converted four of its six generating units to use compressed wood pellets and generated 15% of the country’s renewable electricity in 2017 – enough for four million households. Since transforming the power station to use biomass instead of coal it has become the largest decarbonisation project in Europe.

If you are burning wood instead of coal, you aren’t decarbonising.

Streamers

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

The wisps of smoke are birds/insects being immolated by the Ivanpah solar farm.

la-me-solar-bird-deaths-pictures-009

A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.

Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”

Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.

Coyotes are getting fat on Roadrunners.

In addition, coyotes eat dozens of road runners trapped  along the outside of a perimeter fence that was designed to prevent federally threatened desert tortoises from wandering onto the property.

Words of the Day: “Bird Vaporization” and “Streamers”

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

The title of this post is not one I ever expected to write … even when I write a post mocking the evil greenies.

“Investigators from the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, in a report kept confidential until this week, describe the power towers as a “mega trap” that claims layers of species in the same food chain. The lab is part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“There were hundreds upon hundreds of butterflies (including monarchs, Danaus plexippus) and dragonfly carcasses,” the investigators said. “Some showed singeing, and many appeared to have just fallen from the sky. … Birds were also observed feeding on the insects. At times birds flew into the solar flux and ignited.””

Forensics lab staff observed a falcon or falcon-like bird with a plume of smoke streaming from its tail as it passed through the heat zone. The bird lost stability and descended, but the team could not locate it. The investigators could not identify many burning objects, which they call streamers.

“We observed many streamer events,” the report said. “It is claimed that these events represent the combustion of loose debris, or insects. Although some of the events are likely that, there were instances in which the amount of smoke produced by the ignition could only be explained by a larger flammable biomass such as a bird. Indeed, OLE (office of law enforcement) staff observed birds entering the solar flux and igniting, consequently becoming a streamer.

“OLE staff observed an average of one streamer event every two minutes.”

Read the rest … if you can.

http://www.pe.com/local-news/topics/topics-environment-headlines/20140408-solar-ivanpah-project-described-as-deadly-trap-for-wildlife.ece

(h/t Master Resource Blog)

 

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The Funnel Effect = Mass Insect Mortality at Solar Farms = Migratory Bird Deaths

Published on by sunshinehours17 Comments

Have you heard about the funnel effect?  It appears solar plants can draw in millions of insects and fry them. And then migratory birds drop in to eat the insects and the birds then get fried too.

“USFWS also noted an issue ReWire hasn’t covered before, and we suspect it has something to do with that funnel effect: the mortality of insects. The agency says the Palen solar project may have a serious effect on insects, based on experience at BrightSource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) site, now nearing completion in San Bernardino County. “Staff with the CEC reported large mortalities of insects killed during flux testing at the ISEGS site,” says USFWS. “[A]mong those documented include migratory monarch butterflies and dragonflies.”

A subsequent passage in the note on insects is an important summary of the relevance of insect mortalities to risk to other wildlife:

The ecological effects of mass insect mortalities have not been investigated
and may lead to greater levels of mortality than have been anticipated. In particular,
concentrations of insects are likely to draw insectivorous and omnivorous migratory
birds, including many raptors, which may increase the risk of bird mortalities.

If you have a facility that both attracts an entire food chain and then poses a risk of mortality or injury to individual animals at any level in that chain, then you’ve created an ecosystem-wide population sink that can metaphorically “funnel” individual animals from a wide stretch of habitat to a single spot where they meet their demise.

http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/commentary/usfws-mysterious-funnel-effect-harming-wildlife-at-unnamed-solar-plant.html

Solar Panels Frying Migrating Birds

Published on by sunshinehours12 Comments

“Some animal rights activists are wondering just how many birds green energy may unintentionally kill as more and more birds turn up dead at solar energy facilities throughout California.

A recent article by Vice author Lex Berko notes that dead birds are being found with “singed wings” around several California solar energy facilities.

It happens that many of California’s solar plants are, the article claims, in the path of “the four major north-to-south trajectories for migratory birds” called “the Pacific Flyway.”

Birds are dying in one of two ways. In some cases, they imagine the shining solar panels to be bodies of water and dive straight into them. There they die when they smash into the panels from the sky.

Others “feel the wrath of the harnessed sunlight.” The ultra polished solar mirrors bounce sunrays strong enough to burn the feathers off birds that quickly crash to the ground, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Many of the fowl dying as a result of their unfortunate flight paths over solar facilities are birds protected by the federal government under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/11/12/Oops-Solar-Energy-Plants-are-Killing-Rare-birds