Saturday, October 30, 2010

In an attempt to save year-2050 bats from carbon dioxide, should we install expensive turbines that kill hundreds of thousands of bats right now?

Increasing Wind Turbine Turn-On Speeds Could Help Reduce Bat Deaths, New Study Says | Popular Science
Ironically, one method to ameliorate climate change could make matters even worse for bats. Wind turbines, favored for their carbon dioxide-free power generation, are deadly for bats, especially tree-roosting species that migrate over long distances. One study from the Blue Sky Green Field Energy Center in Wisconsin found for every megawatt of wind energy generated, 22 bats die every year.

Unlike birds, which often perish at wind farms when they collide with the turbines, bats die in blade vortices. Rotating turbine blades create negative pressure pockets, and when the bats fly through them, their lungs explode.
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Some wind sites are killing hundreds to thousands of bats in a single fall migration season,” said Paul Cryan, a research biologist with the US Geological Survey. One wind farm in New York is estimated to kill more hoary bats every year than have ever been collected for scientific studies, he said.
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Most wind turbines in the US are programmed to begin rotating and producing power once wind speed has reached about 8 to 9 mph, according to the Ecological Society of America. Ed Arnett, a biologist with Bat Conservation International, says raising that speed to 11 mph can reduce bat fatalities from 43 to percent up to 93 percent. Even better, the annual energy loss was less than 1 percent.

Slower-moving wind turbines will still kill bats — during two summers of study at a Pennsylvania wind farm, Arnett found a fresh bat carcass every night, no matter the speed of the blades — but it will not kill as many. For the most part, bats don’t fly when it’s too windy.

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