Submitted by universityofturku t3_103ucy5 in science
Yeah I think stopping a mass extinction should be our priority if we want to preserve the ecosystem. But what do I know?
Well, to be clear bats are a pollinator of plant species, as well as a part of the animal food chain, depending on the bat. By disrupting the habitats and migration habits of pollinating species or species that play an important role in the food web of an ecosystem, we disrupt the environment and animal and plant life as well, which leads to degradation or change in an ecosystem instead of preserving it. Ideally we should be studying the environments that are best suited for wind turbines with minimal effect on surrounding wildlife. There’s so much empty land I’m sure this would be feasible
Yep, exactly. I'm also sure that wind turbines are the lesser evil compared to, let's say, a coal plant.
I can guarantee that a wind farm has a far less negative impact on the ecosystem than a coal plant. I'm sure there's studies that can corroborate my assertion, as well.
In the search for clean, sustainable energy, we need to remember that perfect is the enemy of good; but not to allow that mindset to have us become complacent, either. It's not possible for us to arrive at a point that is "good enough", we just have to strive for it anyway.
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Perhaps, bit wind is a drop in the bucket compared to nuclear, which frankly is where all our efforts should go.
Such a weird assertion. Wind is practically harmless and exists in harvestable quantities far beyond anything humans will need for a very long time.
>Wind is practically harmless
more people have died from windmills than nuclear plants
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How many people/animals have developed cancer due to radiation poisoning from windmills? How many acres of land have been deemed uninhabitable from windmills farms? How many windmill farms are leaking radioactive materials into our rivers?
I’m so tired of shills white washing the hazards of nuclear and pushing it as a clean energy.
Wind is great and should be deployed as much as possible in as many places as possible. It's much cheaper than nuclear power in areas with consistent wind and can be built much faster.
The issue, is we can't build enough windmills to solve the climate crisis on its own (not without massive battery storage, which despite curated anecdotes, is still prohibitively expensive at utility scale).
You need reliable, dispatchable, baseload to complement intermittent wind and solar. For that, we need nuclear to take the place currently held by coal and natural gas. That's the most direct path to actually achieving climate targets.
You can build a shitload of nuclear plants to baseload off of or you can invest in energy storage technology and projects which are much better long term solutions.
Do agree nuclear is a good technology but really don't trust humanity to run and store the use fuel responsibily for a thousand years from what I've seen happen in the past 100
It requires resources to build, perhaps those that could be better allocated to nuclear. That was the absolutism but you're right, it was unnecessary.
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Don’t know about Finland, but I work in environmental engineering in the US and in the mandated environmental reviews we do for these types of projects there is literally an entire chapter devoted to bats and their habitats in order to ensure whatever negative impacts that might result from the project are properly mitigated
Trust that a coworker of mine, Andy Linehan, was instrumental in raising the bar on environmental studies of wind impacts on wildlife. His work is still very influential in siting. https://cleanpower.org/blog/the-wind-industrys-atticus-finch/
Did not know this. Thanks for the info!
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We 100% should do our best to ensure we do as little damage as possible to natural habitats, but those bats are going to have a harder time living on a dead earth than one with wind turbines.
Don’t know about Finland, but I work in environmental engineering in the US and in the mandated environmental reviews we do for these types of projects there is literally an entire chapter devoted to bats and their habitats in order to ensure whatever negative impacts that might result from the project are properly mitigated
But do you also do that for marine mammals (and fish) on shipping noise?
And what about radars for air travel?
Yes to all. There is a chapter on marine mammals and several chapters on different kinds of fish. These reports are thousands of pages long and take 5-10 years of study and analysis.
The whales and dolphins are still mass dying.
If they eat bugs they’ll do fine either way.
Animals killed by blades on a wind generator PALE in comparison to the number of animals/people killed by oil spills/slicks and auto exhaust.
With bats I would have thought the sound of blades interfering with their echolocation would be the biggest thing deterring them.
Pretty sure that the pressure gradient upstream/downstream of a turbine fucks up their ears.
That’s not indicated by this study. I don’t know how to quote on mobile in app but here are some relevant paragraphs:
“Our results showed that bat presence was impacted by the presence of wind turbines as both studied groups were found more often further away from the wind turbines. Northern bats were repelled up to 800 metres from the wind turbines, but for the Myotis species the negative impact of wind power was even greater than one kilometre, which was the maximum distance we studied”, summarises lead author, Doctoral Researcher Simon Gaultier from the University of Turku.
“Regarding the results, it is not yet clear if bats avoid the wind turbines themselves, or the surrounding area”, explains Simon Gaultier, and continues: “In Finland, building turbines in forests requires cutting down a number of trees and building large roads to bring turbine parts to the construction sites. Bats like the Myotis don’t like these kinds of changes and prefer dense forests with no open areas. This could be the explanation as why they tend to avoid wind farms.”
Other explanations, such as the noise and lighting emitted by wind turbines or the impact of these machines on insects, have been proposed as potential causes behind bats’ avoidance of wind farms. Regardless of the real causes, this avoidance can drive bats away from habitats that are important for their movement or feeding. This consequence is exacerbated when considering the cumulative effect of all wind turbines already operating or planned in Finland.
They could record the sound the turbines make and set up some speakers in the forest and see if it fucks the bats up
Add to that the number of people killed in car crashes (accidents).
Animals killed by nuclear power PALE in comparison to the number of animals/people killed by wind turbines.
That doesn’t seem to be the case when I was looking up the impact of wind turbines and oil spills each year to each other. It’s nearly a whole order of magnitude against wind turbines, likely because they’re constantly there while oil spills happen occasionally. Is there information I’m missing here or are you including all climate change deaths to the oil spills and auto exhaust section?
Eh. Ecosystems are quite fragile. We don't know the repercussions of this, it seems to be effecting local flying animal life, which way lots of insects, and the insects can be devastating to local fauna, farms, and even humans. It doesn't matter many bats to help clear an area of mosquitos for instance.
Your comment reads like someone who is desperate to defend wind energy, and prove it is "right", rather then trying to find the best path forward.
Birds killed from Wind Turbines: 1 million per year.
Birds killed by cats: 2.4 billion. Windows: 800 million. Vehicles: 200 million. Power line collisions: 25 million.
But let’s get rid of the Wind Turbines…
Also fossil fuels kill more birds than wind or solar per megawatt generated by several orders of magnitude.
Like, there's just no comparison. If you want to protect birds you build wind turbines.
Don’t forget airplane strikes both prop and jet.
I mean.. I'd Link you a study that says effects of wind turbines is largely unknown, but it shows that bats are being driven away from habitats as a result, but something tells me you'd simply ignore it, and just go with whatever information backs your argument up, rather then pursuing truth. But hey, maybe I am wrong.... O wait, this post is literally a link to that exact study, how convenient.
This links to a whole bunch of studies for your reading pleasure:
https://www.sierraclub.org/michigan/wind-turbines-and-birds-and-bats
You're projecting. You are doing exactly what you accuse them of doing. Disgusting.
You know what really hurts ecosystems? Climate change caused by the use of fossil fuels.
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I work in environmental engineering in the US and in the mandated environmental reviews we do for these types of projects there is literally an entire chapter devoted to bats and their habitats in order to ensure whatever negative impacts that might result from the project are properly mitigated. These reports are heavily researched, technical, and available for the public to review and comment on before a project moves forward
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You know what is worse than dead bats? A dead planet. We have to do things immediately and better than before has to be good enough. We have to move in stages. There is no one cure.
Additionally, we can take steps to find places to put the turbines that minimize the impact on the local fauna, and in some instances, on a case by case basis, establish new habitats for them.
The answer is in smart deployment. If we put 1,000,000 wind turbines on a grid across the whole planet, we would make less electricity than putting them in clusters where conditions are most favorable. This describes how flying fauna might be impacted by modern wind turbine installations, and so adds one more factor to favorable conditions.
Another way to address this is to get the rotor tips higher off the ground.
The phrase “BUT SOMETIMES” is such a pox upon human progress. Any change will bring about unforeseen problems, we can solve them as they crop up. Any solution being implemented is not the final version of its concept, we will adapt as we go.
And you know what else kills bats? A dead planet.
Is this zero-sum though? Are we forced to choose between renewables or bats?
I don't think that's the case. There are other sources of renewable, and ways to mitigate the negative externalities of windmills.
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well I’m convinced, time to tear down those turbines and get back to innocently fracking those habitats instead
Tip velocity leads to infra sound, audible noise and strike risk. A solution to this would be smaller, multibladed propellers that create higher torque at much lower tip velocity.
Technically a wing will produce force at zero RPM and there would not be an efficiency loss as such. The settling on 3 bladed propellers is largely due to their mass (hence why to resolve this they need to be smaller). Making them smaller reduces power, unless you combine them with cowlings.
"wind power drives bats away from important habitats" is a very powerful phrase to give to anti green morons.
they have no choice but to take it at face value.
The original research article is available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204622002857?via%3Dihub
Reminder that burning fossil fuels is an existential threat to life on Earth as we know it.
Too bad nobody studied coal sludge pollution and it's effects on animals.
Natural gas water pollution.
Oil refinery pollution and it's massive bird die offs.
You know what's also pretty bad for bats? Climate change induced forest fires.
There seems to be a strong tendency to downplay, ignore, or doubt any negatives associated with renewables because the alternative, fossil fuels, is worse. While true, ignoring or downplaying legitimate problems is a disservice to those impacted. These issues are being taken quite seriously within the ecological community and there are entire organizations dedicated to working on them (https://rewi.org/).
While house cats and oil spills have massive impacts, it is important to acknowledge birds and bats are not homogenous groups; while song birds are heavily predated by house cats* the same can't be said of raptors, which, in turn, are affected by turbines that overlap with their range. There is growing concern that turbines disproportionately affect migratory tree bats. One species, the hoary bat, seems to particularly impacted, and if careful considerations aren't made turbines could affect their population viability.
Is this to say that wind energy is unusable? Of course not. Things aren't so binary. It is to say though, that the siting of turbines should take wildlife into consideration, that we need to continue to research mitigation measures such as operational curtailment and deterrents (said measures need to actually be adopted), and that we should have diverse energy profile to meet our needs.
Some relevant information on the topic:
https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/Z07-011
https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.22244
Wait till you hear about marine mammals
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I'd put money on the pollution from coal generation and loss of land from grazing animal farms is significantly more damaging to bat health than a few wind turbines.
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Oh it's known. It's just suppressed by "big wind."
I've read a similar study aboutthe effects of Windows turbines on bats at least a decade ago. It was carried out in the US. I dont think anyone is suppressing this, but maybe not enough solutions are being considered.
I wonder if switching to offshore entirely would be better. Studies on the effect of WT on marine life are still ongoing, but it seems less harmful to me.
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Makes sense. Avoid bat habitat when feasible. But that is not the only consideration at this point.
Ive always wondered what effect mass adopt of wind power would do to the weather. it is taking energy out of the system which would have to have some impact but how much?
So put hydroelectric in boreal forests and wind turbines somewhere else.
I like the idea of wind power but they've killed a bunch of birds. Maybe the vertical axis type might be better someday.
Then don't build in their habitats. Pretty sure we have plenty of areas that are not in their habitats.
Flying animals such as bats and birds are obviously at high risk. While currently not a overwhelming number of birds die due to the small number of wind turbines in the US, the ones that do are usually birds of prey. Bats being pollinators pose another high risk. Not to mention they are considered endangered in parts of the country and limit construction during certain times of the year. That's not to say there should be no wind farms but they should be judicial about location and sizes. Like anything, there can be too much of a good thing. And for those that don't know some of the new blades and other equipment require special oversize trucks to carry them. That means they need to first improve (design and construct improvements) the roads and intersections (to make turns), trim and remove trees and, relocate above ground conflicting utilities along the entire journey they take to their destination . This is all just to get the equipment to the destination. And get permits to use the streets in each municipality the oversize trucks travel through. Wind farms are a complicated venture and this is just one aspect in addition to the animal deaths. What solves one problem ( clean energy) has the unfortunate issue of creating others.
How are bats with sulfur dioxide?
How about we start by…I don’t know, by keeping 90% of domestic cats INDOORS!!!!!!! ..For the love of all things holy.
Another possible problem - the changed wind currents. I am deeply afraid that harnessing wind instead of the nuclear energy will make the rains rarer deep in the continents, reinforcing desertification.
Please no offense meant Automobiles hit people, deer, donkeys, raccoons. Jet aircraft suck up ducks, geese and even airport workers. Single use plastic gets stuck on fish fins, and turtles. You are right though, we should probably not keep introducing things to the environment that introduce risk to our fellow creatures. I should eat dinner i think I am low on sugar
And global warming kills their food sources outright
Pick one
How'd they like pollution?
Let's put some in Wuhan then!
sounds like a win win, you get power and no bats
Bats are awesome, they eat mosquitoes.
I'm assuming that elevating a wind turbines lower swept region is viable so that bats would rarely encounter it (ignoring other factors that drive bats away like noise, presumably). Bats ought to generally stick to low altitude near flying insects.
ATribeOfAfricans t1_j32y8u4 wrote
Gonna go out on a limb and guess it's probably a lot better than fossil fuels...