the-wind-turbine-death-toll
It is not well known that wind energy is less environmental friendly than most people like to believe. Not only are lovely views and unspoilt landscapes destroyed. More important is the death toll on some of the world's most precious and protected birds.
The problem is that the same locations that make wind turbines profitable, those were the wind blows strong and steadily, tend to be the major flyways of migratory birds. Sometimes they even attract birds with rats and other rodents, which use the turbine basis to build their nests. At one of these places at Altamont Pass in California, where thousands of wind mills have been installed, a lawsuit by the Golden Gate Audubon Society succeeded a year ago with a settlement aiming to reduce the number of bird deaths. But after a year scientist are reporting the measures failed.
In the lawsuit, environmentalists cited a 2004 California Energy Commission report estimating between 1,766 and 4,721 birds were killed by Altamont wind turbines each year, equalling 47,682 to 127,467 birds over the 27-year life of the wind farm. The Audubon Society…noted among the birds deaths are between 456 and 1,129 raptors and other birds at approximately the same pace as before the settlement.
Romantic environmentalists like to evoke pictures of smooth running wind mills of the past but in fact they have developed into disgusting meat processing engines with unreliable and uneconomic energy output. The revival of wind mills is ill conceived and generates ideologically driven products which the market had already rejected many centuries ago for a good reason .
