What about all the birds and insects killed by wind turbines? I have blogged here about these killing machines many times for years!
Where are the animal rights activists when you need them! Were they bribed to stay silent? Were they ignorant? Were they overpowered?
"... Now, the most comprehensive study to date has yielded a distressingly large number. Some 18.7 million bats died from wind turbines in the United States between 1981 and 2024, it estimates—and the problem has grown dramatically worse in recent years. The research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests about 100,000 bats died per year 2 decades ago.
But by 2021, the boom in wind farms had pushed the toll to 1.5 million bats annually. ..."
From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
Wind turbines cause large numbers of bat fatalities in the United States, but the scope and severity of these fatalities have remained largely unknown because monitoring has been piecemeal and focused on site-level compliance.
By synthesizing 499 postconstruction monitoring reports, our analysis can predict fatalities for unmonitored locations and years, identify landscape-level drivers of fatalities, estimate cumulative fatalities across the history of wind energy development, and map where species-specific risk is highest.
Our study estimates 18.7 million bat fatalities in the United States from 1981 to 2024, which may be comparable to total losses from white-nose syndrome. Updated population-level impact assessments could reveal potential cumulative effects across species differentially affected by these threats and further inform conservation efforts.
Abstract
Wind turbines are a major source of bat fatalities in the United States, yet the magnitude and species-specific patterns of these fatalities have remained poorly quantified because monitoring has been site-specific, unstandardized, and not designed for landscape-level synthesis.
In the most comprehensive analysis to date, we synthesized 499 postconstruction monitoring reports and developed a multispecies Bayesian hierarchical framework with an adapted N-mixture model to pool information across sites and estimate total fatalities for ten bat species across the conterminous United States from 1981 to 2024.
Our analysis predicts approximately 18.7 million bat fatalities over this period, with substantially higher species-specific totals than previously estimated. Our framework provides a landscape-level analysis that can predict fatalities for unmonitored locations and years, identify landscape-level drivers of fatalities, produce a multidecade hindcast of cumulative losses due to wind energy, and map where species-specific risk is highest. ...
These threats affect largely different species, suggesting their impacts may compound, but updated population-level impact assessments could reveal potential cumulative effects. Our estimates of species-specific covariate relationships with rotor-swept area, ground clearance, land cover, and proximity to rivers, highlight opportunities to help reduce impacts through wind turbine design and siting.
This work establishes a generalizable landscape-level framework for evaluating wildlife fatalities at wind energy facilities and highlights how coordinated monitoring, data sharing, and population-level impact assessments could further inform conservation efforts."
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