It uses tons of fossil fuels every day, emits a greenhouse gas that’s like CO2 on steroids, can’t do the job it’s made for, costs taxpayers exorbitant fees, and makes the federal government look mentally ill for giving it outrageous subsidies. It also chops up birds, bats and scenery with roads and monstrous 400-foot-tall machines. “It” is wind power, of course.
These harsh facts were condensed into a preliminary draft study of wind subsidies by researcher Teresa Platt, who circulated it to specialists for vetting. I obtained a copy of the extensively footnoted working draft, which gave chilling reality to the truth behind wind industry claims.
“Every year since the 1980s,” Platt’s study said, “the 5,000 turbines at NextEra’s Altamont Pass in California kill thousands of slow-reproducing red-tailed hawks, burrowing owls, kestrels, as well as iconic golden eagles, and bats.” The birds Platt mentions are raptors – birds of prey – particularly valued for their agricultural role in killing mice and other crop-damaging rodents. Eagles, both golden eagles and bald eagles, have long impressed Americans for their majesty, and the bald eagle was selected by our Founding Fathers as our national emblem.
I asked Bob Johns, spokesman for the American Bird Conservancy, about wind farm eagle mortality. He confirmed Platt’s study and told me the Altamont operation alone has killed more than 2,000 golden eagles. But that’s not all. “Nationwide, the wind industry kills thousands of golden eagles without prosecution,” Johns said, “while any other American citizen even possessing eagle parts such as feathers would face huge fines and prison time.”
Huge is right. Violate either the Migratory Bird Treaty Act or the Eagle Protection Act, and you could get fined up to $250,000 or get two years imprisonment.
Not a single wind farm operator has yet been prosecuted for killing birds, yet in 2009 ExxonMobil got whacked with a $600,000 fine for killing 85 common ducks and other birds that flew into uncovered tanks on its property. Other similarly outrageous revenge-style penalties have been assessed on oil companies by the viciously ideological anti-fossil fuel Obama administration.
So Big Oil clearly doesn’t have an Obama Big Wind Get Out of Jail Free card. This unaccounted wind industry bird-killer subsidy reveals a federal multiple personality disorder that must be cured.
Domestic oil and gas production is setting records – thanks to fracking on state and private lands, despite efforts by Obama, Cuomo, Brown and environmentalist lunatic groups to slow or stop it, and despite Obama and comrades continuing to shut down ANWR, OCS and other federal drilling opportunities.
We could totally end reliance on Middle East oil if we would drill more here and permit Keystone XL pipeline. Instead, Obama is still pushing wind and solar, and working with “Green” industry to minimize or conceal impacts, while subsidizing renewable energy to the tune of $11.4 million per permanent job.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hedges its annual windmill bird death estimates at between 100,000 to 444,000 dead birds. That smells like political appointees and staff biologists had both insisted on publishing their numbers – and too many staff biologists promote Big Wind, don’t want bird butchery to hurt Big Wind’s “eco-friendly” image, and don’t want to cross swords with subsidy-hungry politicians.
This body count issue has become a genuine data war, with experts hurling “my data are better than your data” cudgels at each other in the press and scientific literature. For example, a 2013 report by K. Shawn Smallwood estimates that in the U.S. in 2012, some 573,000 birds (including 83,000 raptors) were killed by wind turbines, at a rate of 11 birds per MW of installed capacity.
That’s ridiculously low-balled, says Jim Wiegand, California raptor specialist and Berkeley-trained wildlife biologist. I asked Wiegand what the real number was. “At least 2 million birds per year,” he told me, “and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if over 10 million birds were killed each year by wind turbines.”
Wiegand is an on-the-ground, count-the-corpses type of wildlife biologist who does not take anyone’s word for the facts – a basic requirement of real science. Wiegand’s motto could be “Go and look.”
Therein lies Wiegand’s most potent argument for the Smallwood study’s underestimation: The wind industry has adopted bird-death counting standards that limit counts, so the results look lower than reality: Counters go and look only every 30 to 90 days – letting scavengers remove and devour large numbers of dead birds, artificially lowering the body count. Counters examine only a very small footprint around the windmill tower base – artificially lowering body counts.
Rotor blade tips can be whirling at 200 miles per hour, enough to whack an unfortunate bird “out of the ball park” – far beyond the little counting circle, out where nobody looks, artificially lowering body counts even more. Some critics accuse counters of simply burying some troublesome corpses – the old “slice, shovel and shut up” routine.
Rebutting Smallwood’s report, Wiegand told me, “In my opinion, there are at least 35 bird deaths per megawatt per year across the country. Some turbines kill several hundred birds per megawatt, depending on their location. In high bird use areas like the Kenedy Ranch turbine site in Texas, I believe proper studies on would easily show several hundred bird deaths per megawatt per year.”
The wind power industry must also share responsibility for bird deaths caused by super-long, high-tension lines from distant turbines to cities. A 2007 report estimated the number of such mortality due to collisions on the wing to be at least 130 million, possibly as high a 1 billion, birds per year.
And these numbers are just for birds. We don’t often think about bat benefits, but the U.S. Geological Survey estimates bats are worth $74 in pest control costs per acre – and windmills may have killed more than 3 million bats by last year. A small bat eats about 680,000 insects a year, so 3 million dead bats means 2 billion mosquitoes and other insects that shouldn’t be here are still flying around.
Those numbers are likely way too low, as well. Windmill-caused bat mortality statistics, like bird death numbers, are hotly contested with estimates running into the multi-millions every year.
Wind is usually touted as using no fuel, particularly no fossil fuel. That’s a clever deception. Windmills don’t work when it’s too hot or too cold, or when the wind blows too hard or not at all. So they need a backup, which is usually a coal- or oil- or gas-fired power plant.
Also, every windmill comes with a power line, which comes with a maintenance road, which comes with CO2-emitting traffic. Nobody’s counting that. Why not?
Then there’s SF6, sulfur hexafluoride, the most potent greenhouse gas evaluated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with a global warming potential 22,800 times that of CO2. It’s used to insulate equipment inside wind turbines, their related infrastructure and transmission lines. It may leak during installation or maintenance. or from damaged, aging or destroyed equipment.
Speaking of which, the average service life of a windmill is between 10 and 15 years – not the 20 to 25 years claimed by turbine operators, says a 2012 study by Britain’s Renewable Energy Foundation.
Falmouth, Massachusetts, has the right idea. The town voted 110-91 to remove its two 400-foot industrial wind turbines for health and nuisance reasons. The only problem is paying the $15 million price tag for removal. They need to borrow $8 million to get the job done.
Maybe some powerful Big Green group – think the Sierra Club or Natural Resources Defense Council – will step forward to save Falmouth? Fat chance. They’re in love with bird and bat butchering turbines.
Portions of this report appeared originally in the Washington Examiner and are used by permission.
For those that believe in wind energy and the proliferation of industrial
wind turbines, I always hear the same arguments. “Wind is the future”, “it is
green”, “we will be fixing climate change”, “we are backed with peer reviewed
studies”, “it is a citizens duty to address this noble cause”, “wind creates badly needed jobs”,“it will get us off Middle Eastern oil”, and when addressing the terrible
impacts from these projects………. we represent the “greater good”.
All of the people making these claims might as well say that wind energy will
cure warts, because it is all lies anyway. Wind energy actually solves none of
the problems it is supposed to address. It does create some jobs but there
would be far more jobs if society would concentrate on real solutions. Another
point to never forget is that the titans of industry behind wind energy, are lifetimes away from being altruistic. After all one of their commandments is to create as few
jobs as possible so they can keep more for themselves.
Here is the reality behind this noble “green” cause. Wind energy is a business with a product to sell. In order to sell this product it has to be promoted. In doing so it has relied upon a very deceptive game plan. Here is a look at some of these tactics: (1)The industry is saturated with rigged studies, (2) Wind energy is supported by agency collusion, (3) wind energy has created a world wide genocide of bats and birds but hidden this impact by rigging studies and avoiding real studies, (4) wind turbines will cause the extinction of rare species but it has never been revealed to the public, (5 ) wind energy destroys property values from industrial squalor but this also has been hiddenwith rigged appraisals. (6) wind creates the permanent destruction of scenic view sheds, habitats and fragments ecosystems, (9) wind turbines cause personal agony for close inhabitants and the industry also hides this with their rigged studies, (10) wind is robbing taxpayers, creating huge debt, and driving up energy costs, (11) wind projects have a mortality footprint of thousands of miles for all migrating bird and bat species, but people like me had to disclose this fact, (12) wind energy is supported by media manipulation, and (13) wind is being sold to Americans by industry mouthpieces or pitchmen, our trusted political leaders and conservation groups.
All of this unaccountability has created profits in the billions and an industry
that exudes a disgusting arrogance.
Communities considering wind projects, I have this to say to community
planners. These projects make about as much sense as putting an outhouse on a slope directly above your water supply. In addition everyone that receives a
paycheck from the construction of these turbines is partially responsible for the demise of the whooping cranes, eagles and all the other species disappearing because of this fraudulent industry.
For an in-depth look at the very darkest side to wind energy, everyone
should read either one of these articles, “Hiding the slaughter” or “Big Wind & Avian Mortality” (Parts I and II: Hiding the Problem). Readers will have a better
understanding of industry’s avian genocide and by supporting wind; they are
supporting a completely fraudulent empire.
The wind industry is currently asking for 30 year eaglekilling permits. It is long overdue that the public took notice to the Putin style politics taking place with the Interior Department and the wind industry.
Most of the public is not aware that the FWS has been secretly collecting dead
eagles from wind farms for at least 20 years. In the last 15 years they have
collected about 28,600 eagle carcasses and wind farms in eagle habitat are the
most likely location for a person to ever find an eagle carcass.
In highly quoted and bogus stories carried by the national media, only 67-85 of
these eagle carcasses have been attributed to wind farms out side of Altamont. Over 28,000 are unaccounted for and they weren’t killed by buildings, cars or transmission lines.
The USFWS collects by far the most eagle carcasses from Region 3. This is a Region that includes the states of Minnesota and Iowa. Last year most of the 557 eagle carcasses collected by the FWS from Region 3 were bald eagles. This was about 4 times the total number dead eagles collected from California.
Region 3 also now has about 3 times the installed wind energy as CA.
FWS Region 6 which includes Montana and Wyoming was not far behind sending in 502 eagles to the Eagle Repository in 2013. But Region 6 has only two thirds the installed wind capacity as Region 3. All things being equal, using the Region 6 recovered eagle carcass rate/ per installed MW of wind energy, Region 3 would be probably sending in about 750 eagle carcasses a year.
California no longer sends the most golden eagle carcasses to the National Eagle Repository. This is because their populations have been decimated by wind energy. The FWS now collects the fewest eagles from California.
Regarding these turbines, one thing is certain, the industry and has been killing thousands of bald and golden eagles and lying about it to the public. They did the same thing with all the endangered species being killed in Hawaii by turbines. They covered it up for 7 years until it recently was leaked to the public.
I recommend that everyone read more about the thousands of eagles being killed by wind turbines. Three articles have been published that discuss the rigging of studies, the hidden data held by the Interior Department, and blistering statements made by former FWS special agents disgusted by this runaway industry. It is all in a recently published three part series on MasterResource ………..”The voice of dead eagles”.