Wind Industry Wipeout: Wind Turbines Killing Millions of America’s Bats: Endangered Species Under Threat

February 8, 2020

The wind industry claims a virtuous, moral superiority, but the millions of birds and bats that it slaughters each year, no doubt, think otherwise.

If wind power proponents weren’t so arrogant and sanctimonious, the fact that their beloveds slice and dice countless birds and bats and crush millions of tonnes of beneficial insects each year would probably pass as the natural and justifiable incident of an important power source.

But, starting from the position that these things are not only clean and green, but couldn’t harm a fly, leaves them wide open to a slam dunk charge of hypocrisy.

Then there’s the fact that heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind power can’t be delivered on demand; never has, never will be. Electricity that can’t be provided in an instantaneous response to immediate demand has absolutely no commercial value.

Which means that an utterly pointless power generation system is killing millions of birds and bats and insects with impunity; an exercise in wanton, state sanctioned environmental destruction.

Among those critters clobbered or splattered by 50-60m blades (with their tips travelling at over 350 kmh) are species that feature on the threatened or endangered list. Like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, and Europe’s Red Kite.

Off the coast of Britain, offshore wind turbines have slashed Herring Gull numbers by 82%, European Shag by 51% and Razorbills by....

The picture is no brighter in the USA for America’s bats. At a recent conference in Indiana Ball State University biologist Tim Carter laid out the bloody facts before an audience gobsmacked by the scale of the carnage.

Professor: Many of Indiana’s bats are ‘dropping like flies’
The Star Press
Seth Slabaugh
25 January 2020

Many of Indiana’s bats are disappearing at an alarming rate, but if you’re hoping that means a bat is less likely to sneak into your attic or church, you’re out of luck.

A recent bat talk by Ball State University biologist Tim Carter to local Audubon Society members was humorous and entertaining before turning bloody and fatal — a fact of life for bats.

There are more than 1,400 species of bats in the world, including 45 in the U.S. and 13 in Indiana, a handful of which are commonly encountered in central Indiana.

A longtime bat researcher who displays affection and admiration for the creatures, Carter has noticed that some species have become hard or impossible to find.

The primary cause is white-nose syndrome (WNS), an exotic infectious disease associated with a fungus introduced to the Albany, N.Y., area from Europe in 2006. It has spread west ever since, killing bats by the millions.

Indiana’s own tricolored bats, little brown bats, Indiana bats and northern long-eared bats “are all just dropping like flies,” Carter said.

The tricolored bat, which is the professor’s favorite, has never been super common in Indiana, but he used to be able to catch one per night — or if not one each night maybe two the next night.

“I haven’t seen one in five years,” he said.

And he used to catch long-eared bats all the time. “If we caught 300 bats in a summer, 150 would be long-ears,” Carter said. “With two to three times the effort, we might catch five, so the decline is very real … It’s not just on paper. In the wild, we just don’t see these. They really are getting wiped out. It’s pretty scary stuff.”

Researchers capture bats in volleyball-net-like equipment or harp-like devices containing vertical wires.

WNS is decimating cave bats that primarily hibernate in caves, mines or tunnels during the winter. The disease was possibly transmitted to North America on the clothing of a cave explorer from Europe.

The fungus attacks the bare skin of bats while they are hibernating. As it grows, the fungus causes changes in bats that make them more active than usual and burn up fat they need to survive winter, according to the WNS Response Team, a group of biologists, researchers, land managers and bat lovers.

During hibernation, bats turn off their internal furnace, dropping their body temperature from about 100 degrees to around 40 degrees, the same temperature as a cave, Carter explained. Their heart rate slows to below 20 beats per minute; they take only a handful of breaths per minute. They basically spend their winters in refrigeration or a state of suspended animation.

When they do wake up, they start shivering, and it can take them up to 30 minutes to come out of hibernation. They respond in slow motion if a predator comes along. Which is why they hide out in dark caves, up in a corner where nothing can find them.

“They do occasionally arouse (naturally) and use up some fat reserves, but if we come in and bother them … with flashlights … ‘Look, bats, they’re cool,’ they heard you, right, they just can’t do anything about it,” Carter said. “So they start that process of arousing, “Ooh, we should be quiet and leave them alone;’ and we leave, and the damage is already done … About 30 minutes later … they start flying around, ‘Where are all those people? Did you hear them? … then go back into hibernation, they just used 30 days worth of fat reserves.”

If they use up all the fat reserves they had stored up for winter and it’s only February, and “they eat insects for a living, they’re done,” Carter said.

WNS doesn’t affect migratory bats like the Eastern red bat that is found in Indiana.

Unfortunately, migratory bats are being killed by what Carter calls “wildlife in a blender,” or wind turbines. “People call this green energy,” he said recently to a crowd of bird lovers at Kennedy Library. “I call it red energy. I call them all kinds of terrible things.”

Not meaning to downplay the threat of wind farms to birds, but bird mortality at a wind farm is measured in dozens or hundreds, Carter said, while bat fatalities are measured in the thousands.

“A single wind farm can kill 4,000 bats in a single season,” he said.

The 150-foot-long blade of a wind turbine might not look like it’s moving fast, but on a windy day, it can complete one revolution in four seconds, which equates to the tip of the blade traveling more than 200 mph.

Continue reading here:

https://stopthesethings.com/2020/02/08/wind-industry-wipeout-wind-t...

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Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT

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(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/

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Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law

Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future

"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."

https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/

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