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> Aeromine said unlike conventional wind turbines that are noisy, visually intrusive, and dangerous to migratory birds, the patented system is motionless and vi

by Panino 4y ago

> Aeromine said unlike conventional wind turbines that are noisy, visually intrusive, and dangerous to migratory birds, the patented system is motionless and virtually silent. I've been a supporter of wind energy for 30 years and it's my favorite generation source. I want to believe the claims of this company, but the above quote is activating my spidey senses. Conventional wind turbines are not a serious threat to birds. According to Homebrew Wind Power by Dan Bartmann and Dan Fink, here are the causes of bird fatalities per 10000 fatalities (page 28): 5500 Buildings / Windows 1000 Cats 1000 Other 800 Power Lines 700 Vehicles 700 Pesticides 250 Communication Towers <1 Wind Turbines Many other sources agree. Any wind turbine company will know this. For one to spread this lie makes me doubt their other claims. I hope they're right about price per watt but I have serious doubts. That said, I would LOVE to have affordable grid-tied residential wind to complement my rooftop solar. It's not an easy problem to solve.

zaphod12 4y ago
I can't speak to the technology, but their CEO and marketing staff have been aggressively crapping on other clean energy sources. They also repeated a lot of lies about solar. I hope the tech is real, the people behind it seem like jerks.
- eisa01 4y ago
  Sounds like Trevor Milton Estimated Teslas battery cost by the delta between the normal model and the performance model with bigger battery :)
- exq 4y ago
  Smells like oil industry astroturfing
paulryanrogers 4y ago
Surely those stats depend on the prevalence or absence of wind turbines. So if we had as many turbines as buildings they may well be a greater cause of bird deaths.
- pakitan 4y ago
  Wind power is responsible for something like 5% of generated electricity in the world. If we scale it 1000x, to reach the cat level, we'll have enough electricity to power 50 Earths :)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Someone 4y ago
    More like 20 earths. “5% of generated electricity” isn’t “5% of energy use”, by a decent margin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power: “In 2021, wind supplied over 1800 TWh of electricity, which was over 6% of world electricity and about 2% of world energy”
    - kitkat_new 4y ago
      you neglect inefficiencies of converting primary energy sources to actually used energy
      - stephen_g 4y ago
        Yes. In most applications, literally 45-70% of the fossil fuel is burned just to generate waste heat. This is a huge advantage for renewables, where it doesn't matter that you're not capturing all the energy in the wind going past, because it's not being consumed or generating waste.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ihunter2839 4y ago
From what I understand, one of the big bird issues with turbines is that birds of prey like hawks, eagles, and falcons don't generally look forward but down as they scout for prey, and thus are likely to fly into turbine blades. I believe some turbines have cameras systems to detect birds in the vicinity of the blades and either make a noise to alert the bird or maybe even bring the turbine to a halt. This is really only an issue for large scale installations though, obviously wouldn't apply to low lying roof installations.
- tinco 4y ago
  The bearded vulture is one of Europe's largest birds, it rarely comes to The Netherlands, living mainly in Spain and France. When it does comes to The Netherlands, about once every 3 years, it'll be a national news item as it's quite a spectacular bird. Last year one came, and not a week later it was found dead under a wind turbine. That bird is not just a statistic, it was the single bird of one particular species in our country, and it flew into one of the few wind turbines we have. I'm 100% for wind turbines, I think it's a magnificent sight every time I cross the afsluitdijk seeing them rise from the mists providing us with clean future proof energy. But the sort of stupidity that drives an engineer to say only 1 in 10000 bird deaths is due to wind turbines, without asking why or how or what bird is going to be the end of us all one day.
  - shagie 4y ago
    On this particular vulture (my apologies for looking the way the story is told makes it sound like one of the "They can’t have cows feed under those because it, it causes some kind of birth defects. This is what my sister who has cattle was telling me." ( https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/white-gold/#mp-episode-transcript https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/white-gold/... ))... Yes, this is a real story. https://4vultures.org/blog/necropsy-results-shed-light-on-the-first-bearded-vulture-fatality-caused-by-wind-turbine-collision-in-europe/ https://4vultures.org/blog/necropsy-results-shed-light-on-th... > With certain bird populations like the Bearded Vulture growing, birds can disperse in unusual habitats, and it is critical to find solutions to mitigate such threats. Operators need to develop shut down on demand processes and be willing to cooperate with conservationists to avoid accidents and help save birds. Furthermore, wind farms should implement mitigation measures to help prevent collisions such as equipping deterrent devices and even painting a single wind turbine blade black as a recent study suggests, however, more research is necessary to determine the effectiveness of this anti-collision measure. To safeguard biodiversity, conservationist should work alongside the energy sector to find solutions and prevent such accidents. There are systems that do this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2018/06/07/system-can-shut-down-wind-turbines-to-save-eagles/?sh=380e35557e72 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2018/06/07/system-can-... > Now comes research in the journal Biological Conservation on an automated system that scans the skies and can turn off a windmill if a bald or golden eagle is headed toward a deadly collision. Researchers from The Peregrine Fund, Western EcoSystems Technology and American Wind Wildlife Institute used human observers and photographs to see how well the camera-based monitoring system called IdentiFlight could detect, classify and track birds. > The IdentiFlight system detected 96% of birds detected by observers and 562% more birds than observers. It's not perfect; the system misclassified nine of 149 eagles, for a false negative rate of 6%., with a false positive rate of 28% for misclassifying 278 of 1,013 eagles. Birds were classified as eagles by the system at a median distance of 793 meters (about a half a mile), and detected and classified in less than half a second. The paper is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320717319407 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071...
spaniard89277 4y ago
And they provide a video without sound. The only truly bladeless wind tech I've seen is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7Q92fX2P5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7Q92fX2P5A And they are still not commercial AFAIK.
- hoosieree 4y ago
  Here's a much less horrifying type without blades (or any moving parts): https://newatlas.com/ewicon-bladeless-wind-turbine/26907/ https://newatlas.com/ewicon-bladeless-wind-turbine/26907/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
devonkim 4y ago
The estimate for cats is widely disputed and was a complete WAG with little empirical backing and more like extrapolation from a non-representative sample. There are studies currently in progress to more accurately measure the impact of cats upon bird populations and last I saw the results were showing the prior estimates were grossly overestimated because cats kill many more kinds of animals than just birds like squirrels, lizards, and rodents. Also, I have a 9kw solar setup and simply can’t add more without sacrificing land or basically tearing my house down to make a new, more optimal roof, at which point all the environmental pros of using solar are more than wiped out by the construction carbon footprint. Old homes really are terrible oftentimes for solar installations, sadly.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  The exact numbers re: what kills birds here aren't really what matters. What matters is the relative orders of magnitude. Even if the number for cats is a WAG and wildly off by a factor of 2 in either direction, we can safely say that buildings and windows are far more dangerous to birds than Felis catus. If cats are in fact half as dangerous to birds as estimated, then the danger is still of the same order of magnitude as that from power lines, vehicles, and pesticides. If they are twice as dangerous as estimated, then the danger is still not far off from those other things in terms of order of magnitude. Ultimately, these things are all factors to keep in mind in terms of how we can prioritize actions that benefit the bird population. TL;DR: focus on orders of magnitude here, don't get fixated on exact numbers.
  - devonkim 4y ago
    I think part of my point should be taken further that we don’t even have the correct order of magnitude for cats and the numbers for windmills are so small it’s probably negligible although care should be taken to see if there is some disproportionate externalities observable now such as when Australia changed its own ecosystems with changes to farming practices. What isn’t under so much debate though that does unequivocally matter is the amount of land necessary to convert to renewables which is a function of energy density in urban areas where land use is much more expensive and total energy used per area is quite high. While systems do get more efficient over time the efficiency isn’t exponential and portable energy is a big issue that is mostly orthogonal to renewable sources in funding mechanisms yet also part of the incredibly complex energy supply chain of the world economy.
acchow 4y ago
I'm not sure how to interpret these statistics. Since it's given per 10000 fatalities (and not per square meter covered in said obstacle), can't you conclude that the wind turbine fatalities are so low because we haven't deployed many of them? Whereas there are tons of buildings?
- conductr 4y ago
  This is my thought. What happens when we have 10 million wind turbines out in the wild?
- clnq 4y ago
  I suppose that if fewer than 1/10000 birds are killed by an X number of wind turbines, then we could guesstimate that fewer than 1/5000 birds will be killed by 2X number of wind turbines in a given area. Of course, many other factors are probably involved in any kind of practical estimation. Densities of turbines and wind farms are probably important. There's also the aspect of birds learning to avoid these turbines over time, and the question of whether we can/would do something to make these turbines easier for birds to avoid. For the latter, we have a lot of creative solutions recently - https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut-by-82-as-smart-cameras-spot-birds-then-halt-turbines/2-1-953479 https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut..., https://vortexbladeless.com/technology/ https://vortexbladeless.com/technology/, https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May_EcolEvol_2020.pdf https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May....
- bckygldstn 4y ago
  Wind power accounts for about 10% of total generation in the US. So even if turbines were added to account for 100% generation, and demand increased 10x, it'd still be far less than anything else on the list.
  - acchow 4y ago
    I had no idea wind accounted for 3x the power generation of solar. I always thought it was the other way around...
tertius 4y ago
You're telling me there are just as many windows as there are wind turbines? Or are you lying with statistics?
merely-unlikely 4y ago
> The scalable, “motionless” wind energy unit can produce 50% more energy than rooftop solar at the same cost > An Aeromine system typically consists of 20 to 40 units installed on the edge of a building facing the predominant wind direction I'd like to know how well it performs in variable wind directions vs variable sun directions for solar. Obviously location dependent but I'm guessing the figures quoted are best case scenarios.
BMc2020 4y ago
So I don't have to read the article, what is the swept area compared to a conventional wind turbine? My limited understanding is that what really counts. Also, my other limited understanding is you have to be at least 50 feet above the rooftop, any lower and wind is too turbulent.
themitigating 4y ago
I didn't think birds flying into walls or windows would be the highest
user_named 4y ago
Your cited source is clearly biased towards wind. I don't trust those numbers for a second.

by Panino 4y ago

zaphod12 4y ago

I can't speak to the technology, but their CEO and marketing staff have been aggressively crapping on other clean energy sources. They also repeated a lot of lies about solar. I hope the tech is real, the people behind it seem like jerks.

eisa01 4y ago
Sounds like Trevor Milton Estimated Teslas battery cost by the delta between the normal model and the performance model with bigger battery :)
exq 4y ago
Smells like oil industry astroturfing

paulryanrogers 4y ago

Surely those stats depend on the prevalence or absence of wind turbines. So if we had as many turbines as buildings they may well be a greater cause of bird deaths.

pakitan 4y ago
Wind power is responsible for something like 5% of generated electricity in the world. If we scale it 1000x, to reach the cat level, we'll have enough electricity to power 50 Earths :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Someone 4y ago
  More like 20 earths. “5% of generated electricity” isn’t “5% of energy use”, by a decent margin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power: “In 2021, wind supplied over 1800 TWh of electricity, which was over 6% of world electricity and about 2% of world energy”
  - kitkat_new 4y ago
    you neglect inefficiencies of converting primary energy sources to actually used energy
    - stephen_g 4y ago
      Yes. In most applications, literally 45-70% of the fossil fuel is burned just to generate waste heat. This is a huge advantage for renewables, where it doesn't matter that you're not capturing all the energy in the wind going past, because it's not being consumed or generating waste.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ihunter2839 4y ago

From what I understand, one of the big bird issues with turbines is that birds of prey like hawks, eagles, and falcons don't generally look forward but down as they scout for prey, and thus are likely to fly into turbine blades. I believe some turbines have cameras systems to detect birds in the vicinity of the blades and either make a noise to alert the bird or maybe even bring the turbine to a halt. This is really only an issue for large scale installations though, obviously wouldn't apply to low lying roof installations.

tinco 4y ago
The bearded vulture is one of Europe's largest birds, it rarely comes to The Netherlands, living mainly in Spain and France. When it does comes to The Netherlands, about once every 3 years, it'll be a national news item as it's quite a spectacular bird. Last year one came, and not a week later it was found dead under a wind turbine. That bird is not just a statistic, it was the single bird of one particular species in our country, and it flew into one of the few wind turbines we have. I'm 100% for wind turbines, I think it's a magnificent sight every time I cross the afsluitdijk seeing them rise from the mists providing us with clean future proof energy. But the sort of stupidity that drives an engineer to say only 1 in 10000 bird deaths is due to wind turbines, without asking why or how or what bird is going to be the end of us all one day.
- shagie 4y ago
  On this particular vulture (my apologies for looking the way the story is told makes it sound like one of the "They can’t have cows feed under those because it, it causes some kind of birth defects. This is what my sister who has cattle was telling me." ( https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/white-gold/#mp-episode-transcript https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/white-gold/... ))... Yes, this is a real story. https://4vultures.org/blog/necropsy-results-shed-light-on-the-first-bearded-vulture-fatality-caused-by-wind-turbine-collision-in-europe/ https://4vultures.org/blog/necropsy-results-shed-light-on-th... > With certain bird populations like the Bearded Vulture growing, birds can disperse in unusual habitats, and it is critical to find solutions to mitigate such threats. Operators need to develop shut down on demand processes and be willing to cooperate with conservationists to avoid accidents and help save birds. Furthermore, wind farms should implement mitigation measures to help prevent collisions such as equipping deterrent devices and even painting a single wind turbine blade black as a recent study suggests, however, more research is necessary to determine the effectiveness of this anti-collision measure. To safeguard biodiversity, conservationist should work alongside the energy sector to find solutions and prevent such accidents. There are systems that do this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2018/06/07/system-can-shut-down-wind-turbines-to-save-eagles/?sh=380e35557e72 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2018/06/07/system-can-... > Now comes research in the journal Biological Conservation on an automated system that scans the skies and can turn off a windmill if a bald or golden eagle is headed toward a deadly collision. Researchers from The Peregrine Fund, Western EcoSystems Technology and American Wind Wildlife Institute used human observers and photographs to see how well the camera-based monitoring system called IdentiFlight could detect, classify and track birds. > The IdentiFlight system detected 96% of birds detected by observers and 562% more birds than observers. It's not perfect; the system misclassified nine of 149 eagles, for a false negative rate of 6%., with a false positive rate of 28% for misclassifying 278 of 1,013 eagles. Birds were classified as eagles by the system at a median distance of 793 meters (about a half a mile), and detected and classified in less than half a second. The paper is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320717319407 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071...

spaniard89277 4y ago

And they provide a video without sound. The only truly bladeless wind tech I've seen is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7Q92fX2P5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7Q92fX2P5A And they are still not commercial AFAIK.

hoosieree 4y ago
Here's a much less horrifying type without blades (or any moving parts): https://newatlas.com/ewicon-bladeless-wind-turbine/26907/ https://newatlas.com/ewicon-bladeless-wind-turbine/26907/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

devonkim 4y ago

The estimate for cats is widely disputed and was a complete WAG with little empirical backing and more like extrapolation from a non-representative sample. There are studies currently in progress to more accurately measure the impact of cats upon bird populations and last I saw the results were showing the prior estimates were grossly overestimated because cats kill many more kinds of animals than just birds like squirrels, lizards, and rodents. Also, I have a 9kw solar setup and simply can’t add more without sacrificing land or basically tearing my house down to make a new, more optimal roof, at which point all the environmental pros of using solar are more than wiped out by the construction carbon footprint. Old homes really are terrible oftentimes for solar installations, sadly.

actually_a_dog 4y ago
The exact numbers re: what kills birds here aren't really what matters. What matters is the relative orders of magnitude. Even if the number for cats is a WAG and wildly off by a factor of 2 in either direction, we can safely say that buildings and windows are far more dangerous to birds than Felis catus. If cats are in fact half as dangerous to birds as estimated, then the danger is still of the same order of magnitude as that from power lines, vehicles, and pesticides. If they are twice as dangerous as estimated, then the danger is still not far off from those other things in terms of order of magnitude. Ultimately, these things are all factors to keep in mind in terms of how we can prioritize actions that benefit the bird population. TL;DR: focus on orders of magnitude here, don't get fixated on exact numbers.
- devonkim 4y ago
  I think part of my point should be taken further that we don’t even have the correct order of magnitude for cats and the numbers for windmills are so small it’s probably negligible although care should be taken to see if there is some disproportionate externalities observable now such as when Australia changed its own ecosystems with changes to farming practices. What isn’t under so much debate though that does unequivocally matter is the amount of land necessary to convert to renewables which is a function of energy density in urban areas where land use is much more expensive and total energy used per area is quite high. While systems do get more efficient over time the efficiency isn’t exponential and portable energy is a big issue that is mostly orthogonal to renewable sources in funding mechanisms yet also part of the incredibly complex energy supply chain of the world economy.

acchow 4y ago

I'm not sure how to interpret these statistics. Since it's given per 10000 fatalities (and not per square meter covered in said obstacle), can't you conclude that the wind turbine fatalities are so low because we haven't deployed many of them? Whereas there are tons of buildings?

conductr 4y ago
This is my thought. What happens when we have 10 million wind turbines out in the wild?
clnq 4y ago
I suppose that if fewer than 1/10000 birds are killed by an X number of wind turbines, then we could guesstimate that fewer than 1/5000 birds will be killed by 2X number of wind turbines in a given area. Of course, many other factors are probably involved in any kind of practical estimation. Densities of turbines and wind farms are probably important. There's also the aspect of birds learning to avoid these turbines over time, and the question of whether we can/would do something to make these turbines easier for birds to avoid. For the latter, we have a lot of creative solutions recently - https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut-by-82-as-smart-cameras-spot-birds-then-halt-turbines/2-1-953479 https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut..., https://vortexbladeless.com/technology/ https://vortexbladeless.com/technology/, https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May_EcolEvol_2020.pdf https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May....
bckygldstn 4y ago
Wind power accounts for about 10% of total generation in the US. So even if turbines were added to account for 100% generation, and demand increased 10x, it'd still be far less than anything else on the list.
- acchow 4y ago
  I had no idea wind accounted for 3x the power generation of solar. I always thought it was the other way around...

tertius 4y ago

You're telling me there are just as many windows as there are wind turbines? Or are you lying with statistics?

merely-unlikely 4y ago

> The scalable, “motionless” wind energy unit can produce 50% more energy than rooftop solar at the same cost > An Aeromine system typically consists of 20 to 40 units installed on the edge of a building facing the predominant wind direction I'd like to know how well it performs in variable wind directions vs variable sun directions for solar. Obviously location dependent but I'm guessing the figures quoted are best case scenarios.

BMc2020 4y ago

So I don't have to read the article, what is the swept area compared to a conventional wind turbine? My limited understanding is that what really counts. Also, my other limited understanding is you have to be at least 50 feet above the rooftop, any lower and wind is too turbulent.

themitigating 4y ago

I didn't think birds flying into walls or windows would be the highest

user_named 4y ago

Your cited source is clearly biased towards wind. I don't trust those numbers for a second.