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Painting wind turbine blades black help birds avoid deadly collisions (2020)
- TheBigSalad 3y agoHow about LED strips to protect birds flying at night?
- hnbad 3y agoPeople already complain about the pulsing shadows, the droning hum and the optics. I can't wait to hear them also complain about the nightly LED flicker. More seriously though it should be possible to use LEDs just bright enough to deter birds while also not totally annoy most humans. At that point light pollution and insects might still become a problem though.
- hinoki 3y agoMaybe using UV LEDs? Birds can see higher wavelengths than us.
- beretguy 3y agoPeople will start complaining about cancer risks.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- discussDev 3y agoOoo, we could use LED's that project an image as it goes around and sell that image space to advertisers. /s
- ibejoeb 3y agoThen we can calculate a literal cost per impression, and the unit is birds.
- BurningFrog 3y agoActually sounds like a cool art project!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KennyBlanken 3y agoThis is a problem blown far out of proportion by those opposed to wind power who scream blue-bloody-murder about a few birds killed by turbines while ignoring the much greater number of birds killed by pollution from coal plants those wind turbines are replacing. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/how-harmful-is-renewable-energy-to-birds https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/how-harmful-is-renewable-... > According to the data, while solar* is estimated to cause 1,000 to 28,000 bird deaths annually, and wind 140,000 to 328,000, coal kills far more – about 7.9 million birds a year That's thirty times more birds killed by coal than the upper estimate of birds killed by wind turbines. * "solar" being concentrated solar power, which is quite uncommon. PV panels do not cause significant avian deaths. For anyone about to suggest this is because there is more coal than wind: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1943815X.2012.746993 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1943815X.2012.7... > It estimates that wind farms are responsible for roughly 0.27 avian fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while nuclear power plants involve 0.6 fatalities per GWh and fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 9.4 fatalities per GWh Study link: https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/contextualizing-avian-mortality.pdf https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/contextualizing... More data from the Sierra Club, showing wind turbines are the least of problems birds face: https://www.sierraclub.org/michigan/wind-turbines-and-birds-and-bats https://www.sierraclub.org/michigan/wind-turbines-and-birds-...
- hnbad 3y agoThe article does mention that in passing, though not specifically coal but power lines. It also mentions that house cats literally kill billions of birds a year.
- wenebego 3y agoThe article cites another article which cites https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148112000857 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601... for the coal figure
- pixl97 3y agoI wonder how many are taken out by our windows. More than once I've seen birds die after splashing themselves thinking it's a passage.
- stndef 3y agoWould painting black present potential heat absorption/dissipation issues?
- pbj1968 3y agoMaybe what we need is a fan to cool down the fan.
- seanw444 3y agoYeah the fact that it's spinning as much as it is would probably dissipate any excess heat that black paint would add. Lots of airflow. My guess, at least.
- wreckBITSralph 3y agoCould be an issue when it stops spinning though.
- seanw444 3y agoDoes that happen often? When I pass by the wind farm every time I go to visit extended family, I don't think I've ever seen them stopped. Granted that's not often. I really don't know. I imagine you'd place them in an area where there's almost always wind, otherwise you've planned poorly.
- asow92 3y agoProbably more than those painted white, and another study could help answer that.
- antiquark 3y agoYeah it's a possibility. The black blade might expand more in the heat, so might become (for example) 10 mm longer than the white blades, which could cause a vibration problem due to being out of balance. Currently, all the blades are the same color, so should expand and contract equally in the sunlight.
- scop 3y agoI see a windmill and I want it painted it black…
- 1letterunixname 3y agoNo more will my green sea wind farms go turn a deeper blue
- Simulacra 3y agoBut the black-blade solution may only work in certain circumstances....Many birds, for example, collide with wind turbines at night, when tower colors are irrelevant." Ok. What about spinning or lighted designs in a rotating fan display? I cannot for the life of me figure out what it's called, but when the fan blade spins it makes a pretty design that is visible to birds, but also perhaps pleasing to people.
- justin66 3y ago> perhaps pleasing to people. No.
- beretguy 3y agoJust cover blades in LEDs. Duh.
- ealexhudson 3y agoPersistence of vision. But I don't think these turbines go anywhere near close enough for that to be in danger of happening ;)
- ck2 3y agoCan a "bladeless fan" work backwards as a generator? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bladeless_fan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bladeless_fan
- ajuc 3y agoSth like this: https://vortexbladeless.com/technology/ https://vortexbladeless.com/technology/ Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator
- arghwhat 3y agoA "bladeless fan" is just a ducted fan where airflow is redirected through small openings at very high velocities. As extracted wind power is proportional to the area you extract wind from, using such small opening would be uselessly inefficient even if the air velocity was high enough to make the turbine spin. I suppose it would still be "bladeless" to have a giant duct - larger than the diameter of contemporary windmill blades - that redirect flow to a turbine in the base, but that would effectively be a giant bird blender. So no, not really.
- lm28469 3y agoA bladeless fan is a regular fan with a case around the blades
- blackoil 3y agoWhat about Zebra stripes. I remember that thy keep the flies away.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brk 3y agoHow long until they are covered in LED strips that are programmed to light up with advertisements while the blades are spinning? I'm only partially joking, unfortunately.
- westurner 3y agoWhat about painting eyes on wind turbines to avert birds? /? eyes on things at the airport birds https://www.google.com/search?q=eyes+on+things+at+the+airport+birds https://www.google.com/search?q=eyes+on+things+at+the+airpor... "Wide-eyed glare scares raptors: From laboratory evidence to applied management" (2018) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0204802 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Raptors (birds) > Common names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_of_prey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_of_prey
- westurner 3y agoPerhaps drones can save birds? IIRC Festo has some of the longer flight times with their animal-inspired drones? Would a covered charging dock/cradle for an autonomous or semi-autonomous bird-saving system would save [wind turbine] owners money? "Never landing drone: Autonomous soaring of a unmanned aerial vehicle in front of a moving obstacle” (2023) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17568293211060500 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17568293211060... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=11398876876015661501&as_sdt=5,47&sciodt=0,47&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1139887687601566150... "Orographic"; Orographic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orography
- mypgovroom 3y agoNot building giant towers of waste also helps with this
- arghwhat 3y agoI cannot even remotely comprehend how a modern power plant with the explicit design feature of not wasting resources would be categorized as "waste". Definitely more resources than building a few hundred nuclear power plants, but way way less wasteful than doing nothing and/or building more fossil plants.
- mypgovroom 3y agoDo some research
- ibejoeb 3y agoSerious question: what is threshold at which the number of these turbines sufficiently disturbs normal wind to induce climate change?
- IggleSniggle 3y agoTo induce? Wind power is effectively solar power in another form. They remove energy from the weather system, not add. The wind patterns are already substantially affected by the collapsing of the polar vortex as the reflective ice cover in the Arctic decreases, reducing the (previously consistent) cycling of air around the globe. This is one of the major contributors to more severe weather. All this to say: it's an interesting question, but I think it's already too late to wonder about any effect on "normal" wind. "Normal" wind is a thing of the past.
- ibejoeb 3y ago(The "induce" definition as in to cause or influence an effect.) All of those things may be true, but I disagree that it's not worth figuring out. I mean, if we're greenwashing everything--I just bought carbon-neutral coffee tf is that--we might as well do the math here. This is just like how we raced to ping whales to death. Like, let's game out one move ahead.
- Omin 3y agoThere are some related studies on the effect of wind turbines on storms and how wind turbines could protect against hurricanes by sapping a portion of their energy. While the answer is that they could, the amount of turbines required for that is enormous. This one for example mentions in the abstract that by using an amount of turbines collectively making up 300 GW of capacity, it could severely reduce wind speeds of a hurricane: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120 300 GW is 2/3 of the power consumption of the entire US and you would need all of those in a small-ish area just to dampen, not fully absorb, a catastrophic storm's energy. Even after those wind speed reductions, there is very strong wind. If you scatter those turbines in a larger area, you can imagine that the effect will be much more diluted. There is so much energy in the atmosphere that we won't put much of a dent in it with our current energy consumption.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago> the potential of wind power to damage ecosystems by killing or disturbing wildlife has been a concern voiced by both environmentalists and those who more broadly oppose renewable energy... > In the following three years, just six birds were killed by the painted turbines, compared to the 18 killed by four nearby unpainted turbines, per Ars Technica. Seems like nothing but a distraction. My friend's cat (approximately 0.25m tall, negative 16 watts power production) is more of a menace to avian wildlife than an eighty-meter diameter, 2,300,000 watt wind turbine. That's not all that impressive, that cat is well-known to be quite a menace, but I'll have to tell her about her new rank the next time she switches from purring at belly rubs to biting my hand. Even in the global estimate of half a million birds killed by turbines per year, there are something like 50-90 billion birds on the planet, with an average lifespan of 2-5 years. Something like 20 billion birds die every year of various causes, if 0.0025% of those deaths are caused by 900 gigawatts of wind turbines that's OK. If the proposed alternative to these turbines is not austerity but coal-fired power, the long-term climate effects of that are more deadly still.
- ricardo81 3y agoAppreciate your point as there's solid numbers about avian deaths of birds from cats vs turbines. There's a fair point about larger birds of prey who have smaller populations (and quite possibly longer breeding times). I think it's a valid point, vs the isolated number of birds killed by turbines used as a reason against wind resource. Also have to factor in the amount of deaths caused by air pollution, humans or otherwise.
- orev 3y agoSounds like a false dilemma fallacy to me. Wind turbines and cats aren’t related in any way, and if both are a problem the solutions are completely independent of each other. How does painting turbine blades have any effect on birds killed by cats?
- hutzlibu 3y agoI would think his point is, that the number of bird deaths are simply neglectible compared to what for example house cats do (or windows). So no need for much further research, that could be spend better elsewhere.
- thelastgallon 3y agoIn the United States alone, outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year:https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/ https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
- bombcar 3y agoTIL there were 2.4 billion birds in the USA.
- BurningFrog 3y agoThere were, before cats killed them.
- bombcar 3y agoAt 60 million cats in the USA, each is killing 40 birds a year, or about once a week. Furry killing machines each and every one. But some sites say that there are an additional 40 million feral cats, and that the "owned cats" are 80% indoor-only. Tom and Jerry tried to warn us.
- orwin 3y agoMy father managed to 'adopt' a feral cat that should have been 1-2 yo at the time. That cat used to kill up to three birds a day from April to September, and even with cats food and a bell, managed to regularly catch birds. He even killed a magpie once (he's a thick boy). If the population of feral cat is really 40 million, 2 billions killed seems a bit low.
- bombcar 3y agoAt some point a cat's gotta eat, and if they're feral they're eating animals or garbage, mainly. I don't know how much of a cat's diet "in the wild" can be plant-based. But I suspect you have a small number of cats that are just murder machines, some that eat birds to stay alive, and the vast majority of fat housecats that just eat chickens via a giant grinder at the pet food store.
- keiferski 3y agoI wrote an article [1] a few months ago about whether wind turbines are ugly and how/if they could be made more beautiful. Painting them black is definitely not going to be received well by people that consider them ugly. The most interesting solution I came across was using LED lights [2] to match ambient colors of the sky. Here’s the description from the prototype creator: I built a scale prototype using a foam core silhouette of a wind turbine as seen from land. The structure was covered in LED Tape lights and linked to a potentiometer to control their brightness. I installed the turbine along the San Francisco beach and powered it using a car battery. After some quick adjustments, the silhouette vanished into the background sky. I think this solution, combined with some kind of flashing ultraviolet signal (as birds can see UV, IIRC) is the best route for both birds and humans. 1. https://onthearts.com/p/are-wind-turbines-ugly-could-they https://onthearts.com/p/are-wind-turbines-ugly-could-they 2. http://www.taismauk.com/#/camouflage-for-offshore-wind-turbines/ http://www.taismauk.com/#/camouflage-for-offshore-wind-turbi...
- kjkjadksj 3y agoIts funny how much handwringing there is about wind farming aesthetic. The alternative is far uglier. A field of oil derricks is both ugly and smelly. A refinery takes up a massive footprint, is also smelly and ugly, and demands a lot of trucking and freight rail connections to boot. We even put this stuff next to our most valuable real estate, in the case of the inglewood oil field or chevron’s el segundo refinery.
- keiferski 3y agoThat’s very true, but I do think if the goal is to increase wind power adoption, the aesthetic issue should be addressed. In other words, just saying the alternative is uglier isn’t really the optimal approach.
- mrguyorama 3y agoHow about: It's literally not an issue. They are industrial pieces of machinery, which probably work better if we don't handicap them with some asinine requirement to "look good", which is an unworkable requirement since plenty of people ALREADY think they look wonderful and would look worse if changed. We should not let a bunch of NIMBYs crying about stuff not even on their property or neighborhood who are just pitching a fit about any change stop us from undoing the impending climate catastrophe we have created for ourselves by refusing to do anything that the dumbest and angriest people seem to be upset about. Wind turbine adoption is driven at the ballot box, not in the hearts and minds of a bunch of selfish people.
- thelastgallon 3y agoWorldwide, estimates suggest more than 70 billion chickens are killed each year, not including chickens killed by the egg industry: https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-chickens-are-killed https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-chickens-are-killed Worldwide, around 7 billion male chicks are culled each year in the egg industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
- gertrunde 3y agoMay be worth a [2020] date tag. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257648
- jlos 3y agoIts crazy reading threads of people casually justifying wildlife impacts as collateral damage for wind turbines, when they would never use those arguments to justify wildlife impact for oil and gas. "Listen, cats kill millions of birds each year. So a few more die in tailings ponds?" Not saying either should get a pass; companies installing wind turbines should be held to the same standard and not off just because they are "renewable"[0] [0] Even the fact we consider wind/solar "renewable" is evidence of how slick the marketing campaigns are for these companies. Solar panels and wind turbines have limited life spans, require rare earth metals that have to be mined. Solar and wind energy are renewable but how we harvest that energy is decidedly NOT renewable.
- perlgeek 3y ago> [0] Even the fact we consider wind/solar "renewable" is evidence of how slick the marketing campaigns are for these companies. Solar panels and wind turbines have limited life spans, require rare earth metals that have to be mined. Solar and wind energy are renewable but how we harvest that energy is decidedly NOT renewable. "renewable" is clearly an approximation here, as there is no truly renewable energy source in the sense that it doesn't need any equipment or infrastructure that could degrade over time. Just like "rechargeable" batteries aren't infinitely rechargeable. But there are studies that look at the whole-lifecycle impact of wind and solar and find them better than most alternatives. Certainly better than oil, coal and natural gas.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoYou are buying into the fud and letting perfect be the enemy of good. Sure turbines might kill a bird. But then again, probably far fewer birds are dying due to energy production in a world of wind energy than one of fossil fuels.
- coremoff 3y agoMany more birds are killed colliding with windows each year, but we still install transparent windows too. Much human activity negatively impacts wildlife - we should be pragmatic in addressing these problems, and the harm to wildlife from renewable energy is significantly less than the harm caused by fossil fuel energy.
- carapace 3y agoAre we not switching to the non-moving ionic wind generators now? I thought that was the next big thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator