Comment on Floating turbine towers above — the S1500 hovers to harvest wind at 131 feet

• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You know, I was skeptical that birds even got up that high.

  Turns out this thing is actually far too low.

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  Incidentally, also why the other wind turbine bird death stories are largely horseshit.

  Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade.

  Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds—between 12 and 64 million each year—are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity.

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  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    doesn’t this use elevations compared to sea level? while the elevation of this turbine is compared to local ground level

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  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I wonder if the way they tested it to get those higher numbers was something like finding a field where birds were roosting with windmills present, then fire off some massive fireworks at night and assume any bird that died did so because of the windmills.

    Assuming they didn’t just pull the numbers out of their ass and actually designed a bad faith experiment that could inflate bird deaths.

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