DDT Doesn’t Kill Birds – Wind Turbines Do
Wind Turbines damage the environment. At least this article (portion – sub required (email and I’ll send you a copy)) at the New Scientist says they do. Here’s how:
In the UK, the best wind conditions are those found in rolling hills and near the sea. Unfortunately, these conditions are good for peat bogs. Now peat bogs are natural carbon sinks, so building a wind turbine on them doesn’t make much sense. Worse, when disturbed the peat can dry out, and release carbon dioxide as it does so.
Nobody ever said combatting global warming was going to be easy. Well, the nuclear people said so, but then we’ll just ignore them because radiation is scary – and so are they.
The wind turbines sit on meter thick concrete pads. Concrete happens to produce lots of global warming gases – meaning that it may take anywhere from 6 to 18 years for the wind turbine to “save” enough greenhouse gas-free energy to justify building the thing in the first place. That is far beyond the 3-6 months the wind turbine developers said it would take, and a significant portion of the 25 year life span of the turbines and their support structure.
Building on bogs also requires the building of roads, which can disturb the environment as far away as 250 meters from either side of the roadway – way beyond the estimated 10 meters of disturbance predicted by the developers.
The problem isn’t limited to bogs either. Little studies have been done about the damage caused by placing the turbines at sea. In California the turbines have minced eagles and hawks. The problem is particularly bad in Norway:
The Smøla islands, 10 kilometres off Norway’s north-western coast, have one of the highest breeding densities of white-tailed or sea eagles in the world. Smøla also has a new wind farm, most of whose 68 turbines started turning last summer. Between August 2005 and May 2006, researchers have found nine sea eagles killed by turbine strikes. ... “Breeding results on Smøla have been strikingly poor compared with the 30 years before the wind farm was built,” says Arne Follestad from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. “We are not confident that white-tailed eagles will adapt to the turbines and return to the wind park area.”
It’s too bad that Norway does not have a nuclear power generation program, because it appears that in a few years, it won’t have sea eagles either.
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