Blowin’ in the Wind Part II

Last May I wrote, with great exuberance, about the fancy new wind turbine on Cleveland’s lakefront, pumping megawatts of power into the Great Lakes Science Center. I’ve had a remote connection to some folks monitoring the site for dead birds and the reports, albeit secondhand, have all been positive. No birds have been whacked by the props.
Then last night I heard Mark Shieldcastle speak. Mark is a wildlife biologist with the Crane Creek Wildlife Research Station out near Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge. By the end of Mark’s hour-long presentation, me, and a lot of the other left-leaning tree huggers were having second, maybe third thoughts about wind generated electricity.
Wind turbines, touted as a green alternative, ain’t so green it seems. First, they’re notoriously inefficient. Their efficiency rating is about 15%. Nuclear power is about 85%. And they’re not so animal friendly, either. Had I thought through the scenario, I might have figured out why people are not finding dead birds at the base of the wind turbines in this area. The example Mark used was a Golden-crowned Kinglet weighing five-grams, traveling 10 mph. In the dark it meets a turbine prop traveling at 150 mph. The area enclosed by the circumference of those spinning blades equals about four acres! How much of that bird would be left and in what direction should we look? Oh.
The proposal that is giving people sweaty palms here in Cleveland is the installation of turbines out in the lake. Listen closely and you can hear peoples’ lips smacking. As Mark points out, if we can’t find dead birds on land, what chance would we have of finding them in the lake?
This area of the planet is critical to bird migration. It’s one of the best spots anywhere for warbler migration in spring. It’s about the only spot on Earth where the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler has been seen off its breeding grounds in Michigan. And while birds often fly higher than the 400-foot-high or 600-foot-high towers that are proposed, they to land and take off with frequency in the lake and around the lake shore.
Information on bird strikes against wind turbine blades is minimal at best. Altamont, California, has some good data because the turbines there are killing hundreds of large raptors with frightening regularity. A mystery killing by wind turbines is happening to bat species, says Mark. Thousands of bats are being killed by the wind farm project in the Appalachians of West Virginia. For some unknown reason, bats are attracted to the spinning blades. They’ve also found dead bats at the site of Ohio’s only wind farm, in Bowling Green.
A recent article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer quotes Amy Gomberg, environmental advocate for Environment Ohio in Columbus, as saying, “I don’t believe wind developers would put up wind turbines where they would have a negative impact on birds. It would make them look bad.”
Oh, my. Wake up! Big Wind is lining up at the government trough just like Big Oil, Big Guns and Big Auto have done for years. Without more solid science regarding the impact of wind turbines on wildlife, Big Wind is going to create a giant sucking sound heard throughout northeast Ohio and wherever else it can site its wind farms. And only when pigs fly, and get sliced up in the turbine blades, will they care about looking bad.