2 ms·
> Those numbers are included above The comment you're responding to is asking for bird deaths / W (power output). This, > 0.27 avian fatalities per GWh for wi
by deathanatos 3y ago
> Those numbers are included above
The comment you're responding to is asking for bird deaths / W (power output). This,
> 0.27 avian fatalities per GWh for wind, 9.4 avian fatalities per GWh for coal.
Is birth deaths / J (energy output), essentially. It's not accounting for that there's roughly 30 times as much coal generation as there is wind generation. I've put a comment elsewhere that computes the /W numbers: coal is slightly better than wind at not killing birds. The core comment stands — the issue with wind is blown out of proportion — but the stats justifying it should account for the amount of generation.
Edit: no, maybe I'm wrong here. I've not had the morning's coffee yet. While the unit is funny choice, … it should be fine. But the math doesn't check out with the first article's numbers. Table 1 from your article with the GWh numbers should contain the data I need, but the site is broken such that I cannot access table 1. So, like, these either grossly contradict the article … or something's amiss.
Edit 2: yeah, I think you do want GWh; you have to involve time somewhere, as it's a rate of bird deaths that's calculated. I think the first article's per-annum deaths is what is giving me a headache here, since it's sort of an implied rate in a lot of the writing. So /GWh works … but the math still needs to check out, which it does not appear to.
- Retric 3y agoYou’re off by an order of magnitude. Coal is 35.7% of the world’s electricity supply in GWh/year vs 7.5% for Wind. So it’s only 4.7x as much coal as wind.
- deathanatos 3y agoNo, I'm not. Your ratio is correct for the current numbers for coal/wind; the article is using 2009 numbers for bird deaths. If we want to fairly scale those numbers, we can't do (bird deaths from wind in 2009) / (wind power gen in 2022) or we end up with more nonsense. In 2009, wind power gen was ~275 TWh, coal was 7817 TWh.[1] There's roughly a 30x difference between those. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
- Retric 3y agoWhich might be relevant if the most recent data we had was from a study published in 2009 except it’s not. As turbines got larger the deaths per GWh decreased due to multiple factors. Which is why people have largely stopped looking into it. https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds “A 2012 study found that wind projects kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, compared to 9.36 birds killed per gigawatt-hour of electricity from fossil fuel projects.” And things have continued to improve.