3 ms·
No, 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 nu
by deathanatos 3y ago
No, 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.