Technology explored to protect birds from wind turbines

• Wind farm developers are urged to install away from migratory routes

With all of the good news about wind energy and the economic boom to some landowners in northern Lincoln County, other voices counter that the industry is killing an estimated 328,000 birds each year in North America, making it “the most threatening form of green energy.”

Officials with the Audubon Society and Save the Eagle International are two of the organizations worried about the avian death rate from wind turbines. While research in underway in technology that might reduce the impact, solutions appear elusive and data is scarce. Not all the victims are birds, bats also are dying. According to the Spanish Ornithological Society in 2012, actual carcass counts from 136 monitoring studies concluded that Spain’s 18,000 wind turbines were killing up to 18 million birds and bats annually.

Bats provide pest control to agriculture in the United States valued at more than $3.7 billion a year and raptors control the rodent population.

But wind turbine advocates contend the number of birds killed annually by turbines is a small fraction compared to an estimated 6.8 million bird deaths from collisions with cell towers and more than 1.4 billion deaths from cats.

According to a story published by Audubon in March of this year, more than 49,000 individual wind turbines exist across 39 states. An incentive to stop the “slaughter” is contained in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act passed in 1916, which makes it illegal whether or not it is unintentional, to kill any bird protected by the act. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act recommends that to avoid eagle deaths, companies site their wind farms away from bird migratory paths and that they use techniques such as radar to detect birds.

The author noted that several types of retrofits are being tested to reduce the impact on birds. One of them is the use of cameras, radar and global positioning satellite technology to detect incoming flocks far enough in advance to cover the time required to shut down the turbines. She noted that Babcock and Brown in 2006, was the first to install a system at the Gulf Wind Project in Texas now owned by Pattern Energy, the anchor company in the Sun Zia transmission project designed to run from south of Corona in Lincoln County into the Phoenix area of Arizona.

Another system aims to protect the California condor, America’s most threatened species with only about 230 surviving in the wild. The author wrote that most are tagged with GPS sensors, so owners of the wind farm in California’s Tehachapi Mountains, came up with a system that in two minutes “shuts down the turbines when a condor is within two miles of the wind farm.”

The Audubon writer listed several other options being explored, including bright blades, bright lights and turbines that look like trees and operate on a vertical axis with blades that circulate around a central spire and cameras that could spot birds more than a half mile away and trigger a shutdown.

“But do any of these methods actually mean fewer birds die?” the writer asked. Most options still are experimental and lack data.

Officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommend that new wind farm developers avoid migratory routes, places where raptor prey congregate and water filled landscapes. But compliance with the recommendation is voluntary, she pointed out. That could change with an update to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. New provisions could limit permits only to companies able to show they are doing everything possible to avoid bird strikes.

Meanwhile the U.S. Department of Energy is awarding grants to researchers to test options and the nonprofit American Wind and Wildlife institute is compiling the first catalogue of solutions and will conduct independent reviews of each.