Monday, December 23, 2024

Wind Turbines and Bird Deaths

The practice of painting one blade of a wind turbine in order to increase its visibility to birds is becoming commonplace. Avian brains are not wired to detect such enormous structures as a threat, but increasing the contrast and making the movement more visible helps them see it as something dangerous to be avoided.

To be clear: this is a good thing. Harming birds, even unintentionally and without malice, is bad and taking steps to avoid it is good.


But this is another example of bad faith attacks, launched carelessly and repeated endlessly, turning into a multi-year effort by the clean energy industry to respond to. The number of birds involved was tiny, less than 0.02% of bird deaths. A study in South Africa found 848 birds killed, over the course of four years, across 20 wind energy sites. This is not a large number.

The next set of allegations about wind power are harder to refute because they are completely fabricated: that wind turbines cause cancer, or that offshore turbines kill whales.

The people making this stuff up do not want to challenge clean energy to be better. They are not interested in seeing improvement to address whatever harm they cite. They are only interested in deterring the deployment of clean energy because money from fossil fuels funds their movement. It is all in bad faith, and the disproportionate cost falls on clean energy to address.