Several years ago there was an article in St. Pete Times about survey done re: radio towers and bird kills. Survey was by U. of Fla., I believe. Not many towers were included in the study, but the dead-bird count was in the thousands per year for each tower. 35,000 at the worst? I'm not a fan of windmills :o) They will have their own impact, but, then, it's better than freezing.
snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@f30g2000yqa.googlegroups.com:
Let's not start talking about Christie (spelling?). He's a populist rabblerouser who will not get done what needs to be done (such as more public transportation).
On Sat, 05 Feb 2011 08:27:35 -0500, " snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net" wrote Re Re: Wind mill:
It's an even worse idea than solar. What will we do in the winter at night and when there is no wind?
Caesar Romano wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
With all due respect, IMO you're nuts. Windmills as power generators do have their place. But they should be were there is relatively continuous wind, and where they can easily "ship off" their generated power. That means in flat plains, atop hills or mountains and offshore, near existing or easily built transmission lines. Or they may be atop skyscrapers (perhaps, we don't have a heliport atop the PANAM building in NYC anymore, not only because it was renamed, but because the helos had accidents.
IOW, be reasonable where and when to build those wind power generators.
But, even in those areas (this is the High Plains here, one of the highest wind areas in the US) and the Gray County wind farm has produced at only 40% of installed capacity over the 8 years since installation based on EIA production data. The highest monthly production in those 8 years has barely exceeded 50% and the average during Feb and Aug is in the mid-20% range as the wind doesn't blow as much even here during those changing-seasons periods.
So, that means that on average there has to be 2.5X times the installed capacity to meet a given load demand and that there also has to be spinning reserve to make up for the shortfall when the wind doesn't blow to maintain a high reliability for the overall grid. Both of those are expensive propositions as well as it is still double the cost/MWe on the grid for the wind power as compared to conventional generation.
It simply isn't a panacea some would wish it to be nor will it ever become so...
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Yes, windmills kill a lot of birds, but there are also a lot of birds that DON'T fly into windmills (and windows). What will eventually happen is that the birds that die hitting windmills will not reproduce but the ones that live will. Eventually, the surviving birds (which now have more food and habitat available as a result of reduced competition) will reproduce and in general, the species will now consist of individuals that are smart enough to avoid the hazard of windmills. Whether they do it by sound, smell, sight or ESP doesn't matter. It's just how evolution works. Sometimes threats are so serious that almost entire populations die out but the few remaining individuals with resistance or avoidance abilities survive and the population levels usually return to whatever the habitat supports. Those individuals will pass whatever traits that enabled them to survive to their offspring.
I was at an immunlogy conference with my MD friend once and the speaker said that humans have allergies and runny noses as a result of having survived plagues and epidemics where a "positive flow" respiratory system expelled the germs and parasites that killed other, drier nosed individuals. So when you're suffering with red eyes and a runny nose in the spring or fall, remember, that inconvenience to you now probably saved your great great great great great great great great great great grandmother from dying from the plague or some other type of disease.
Blood antibodies work in much the same way, "remembering" diseases that you or your ancestors have encountered. It's why many of the native Americans (both N. and S.) died off by the tens of thousands when they first became exposed to diseases of the European continent.
The bottom line is "survival of the fittest" and birds now have to include "ability to avoid windmills" in their fitness.
-- Bobby G.
dpb wrote in news:iijsiv$61h$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:
I'm considering the possibility that that low % is because of either contracts specifying how much has to be bought from other sources, or competitive prices of other sources.
"Robert Green" wrote in news:iik221$r19$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:
I agree but that is a tough assignment for the birds ...
...
8-yr averages are all very similar showing the patterns consistent w/ weather. Feb and Aug are both high demand months in cold and hot weather, respectively. Given the consistency over that long an operational period, I'm convinced it is at significantly production-limited by lack of wind.I've not been able to get information from the producer about the limitation they're having in selling product; they've been unwilling to share same. And, unfortunately, there's no publicly available data site for windspeed information in a convenient-enough format I've gone to the trouble to try to correlate with. The closest NWS official recording station is Dodge City which is 30+ miles but it would still be of some interest as country out here is quite open and long-term trends would be of at least corroborating if not conclusive. But, the download formats are either too detailed or too coarse to be practical given my limitations with dialup and access to have been worth the effort, at least so far. I'd surely like to have access to the site data, but they're not amenable to sharing anything at all, unfortunately. :(
IMO, if that _IS_ the issue, that's damning evidence prima facie that they only exist owing to government mandates and cost-share/subsidies and that it is _NOT_ a cost-effective solution.
If you're interested and would like to see the data (it is interesting to see), e-mail me off list and I'll forward the spreadsheets I've prepared. bozarth dot d is the gmail addy; let me know if you do as I don't check that address on a regular basis.
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By that theory passenger pigeons should have evolved tha capability to avoid hunters.
30g2000yqa.googlegroups.com:
Spoken like a rabblerouser who doesn't live here. He's already got the budget under control by cutting spending, which is EXACTLY what needs to be done. Just wait until all the union contracts come up for renegotiation.....
Different situation entirely. PP's nested in huge flocks that made them easy prey for hunters. What had been a positive adaptation that protected them from their previous natural predators became a serious liability when humans arrived. PP's were killed by the tens of thousands because their huge flocks (like the huge herds of buffalo) made it very easy for humans to slaughter them en masse. Windmills pose no such threat as they don't kill entire flocks of 50 to 200 thousand individuals they way human hunters did. Windmills represent exactly the kind of threat that evolution can deal with. Some birds obviously DON'T fly into windmills or windows and that allows natural selection to operate. Crows don't fly into windows (that I know of) and eat the dead birds that do. Sometimes, you need brain power to survive.
Slaughtering all the individuals means no one survives, neither the fittest nor the weakest. In this case, evolution was "saying" congregating in huge flocks was once a survival mechanism but became a liability as new threats evolved.
Take the dodo, for example. Limited population, overwhelming threat. The dodo evolved in isolation from significant predators and had no fear of humans and could not fly, making it easy prey for humans. Humans also brought hitherto unknown predators like rats, pigs, dogs and cats whose sudden introduction overwhelmed the dodo.
Windmills will never be so ubiquitous that they would be capable of killing all birds. Windows, as others have pointed out, have not managed to extinct the house wren, and they're far more common than windmills. Besides, the dodo wasn't much of a bird in that it couldn't fly. Nor could it escape the island of Mauritius to find a new, less dangerous habitat. Their loss of flying ability was a negative adaptation and as such, they paid the price for giving up their wings: Extinction.
There's a reason we're the top predators on the planet. We're very good at predation on a large scale, even upon ourselves. Yet creatures like the cockroach and the rat have resisted everything we've thrown at them. Perhaps it's because they don't congregate into huge swarms like the PP's did or don't approach humans fearlessly (and fatally), like the dodo did.
-- Bobby G.
The problem with that theory is the timeframe. Do your really expect windmills to be around for the next 50,000+ years? Windmills will be long gone before any species evolves to deal with them.
snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@r16g2000yql.googlegroups.com:
I have lived in Bergen county for the past 12+ years. OK, my daughter and son-in-law are high school teachers in South Orange and Paterson. Our town is now having trouble making ends meet, as are many towns. I agree that there are many things where cuts eed to be made, not the least of them pensions calculated on the amount of overtime in the last years of employment. And if you would want your kids being taught by 35K/year teachers and have the legislators and administration give money to their friends, yes, then I'm a rabble rouser.
Sometimes, when I can't sleep at night, I think about all the travails my ancestors had to survive in order for me to lie there in bed, safe but sleepless. Life is unfortunately no different for the birds. I remember my teary-eyed grandfather telling me how his grandfather had to dig his own grave before he was shot to death by the Red Shirts in Italy. We've got it sooooo easy now.
-- Bobby G.
They are probably concerned with heavy machinery traffic that any type of sizable construction would require: a couple of big trucks and a heavy crane with diesel engines and hydraulic fluids leaking near the stream. I think that's what they'd be concerned about, not an operational windmill.
Never hurts to ask the TWP directly though.
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their offspring.
The problem with that theory is the timeframe. Do your really expect windmills to be around for the next 50,000+ years? Windmills will be long gone before any species evolves to deal with them. ============================================
The theory is actually quite sound. It's been proven by studies on the Galapagos islands that birds can change their beak shapes in just a few years to adapt to changing food sources:
Evolution appears to operate far more quickly than anyone, even Darwin, suspected. I'd guess with their short lifespans, windmill avoiding birds are evolving as I write this. Dude, you need to watch more Discovery channel! (-:
In the cosmic scheme of things, CFL's with mercury are going to do way more damage to more species (including man) than windmills ever will. And no, that "offset" BS about how putting mercury in CFL's reduces mercury from power plants doesn't fly with me. It's just power company propaganda to avoid the expense of doing the *right* thing - scrubbing mercury out of coal plant smokestacks. It's amazing what the Big Business PR machine will get people to believe.
Hopefully LEDs will soon send CFL's into extinction where they deserve to be along with the teeny bit of poison contained in each bulb. Funny how proponents emphasize how small an amount that is but not that it's in billions of light bulbs. Studies are already finding increasing amounts of mercury in the bottom of trash trucks and landfills. That's to be expected in a nation where recycling hazardous waste is haphazard at best and the lifespan of CFLs has been incredibly exaggerated. If they really lasted 10 years, where's the sudden uptick in mercury found at transfer stations and landfills coming from?
-- Bobby G.
About 20? years ago, I read a very chilling thriller novel about that very concept- terrorists bring an LNG tanker into a harbor (forget which one) that fronted a wide river that happened to have enough cliffs and such to make a natural bowl to contain a gas cloud, and somehow vent it off without the safeties kicking in. They also timed it for the exact worst possible weather conditions (hot muggy still day, etc) so wind would not disperse it. I can't remember how it came out- the hero probably pulled off a save at the last second or something- but they claimed even a small LNG tanker could produce a gas cloud big enough, that if it could be kept intact long enough to light off, would do similar damage to a small nuke.
Author coulda been speaking out of his ass for all I know, but the data presented seemed consistent with my limited knowledge of pyro and explosives and flammable gases.
LNG is lighter than air when it vaporises. May be a little hard to contain it like that to get enough built up to do that kind of damage.
Jimmie
Back in the 1970's the operator of the orchards surrounding our place would bulldoze out the channel and dam the creek that ran behind our place. I cannot imagine how ballistic the econuts would go if someone tried that today.
Within the past week the local newspaper had a story about a local farmer who put up a couple windmills. The quotes from a neighbor objecting to ruining the view could be predicted with 110% accuracy. Something similar a few years ago in rich and liberal Marin County, CA where the hypocritical residents forced the windmill to be built out of sight.
I find the econuts to be pretty transparent about their goal of obstructing any and all projects. It's commercial interests that disguise their motives behind eco complaints.
Somehow, and I'm not sure how, the kooks have taken over the country.
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