this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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33
French energy giant ordered to switch off wind turbines that kill endangered birds (www.telegraph.co.uk)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In what bird lovers are calling a landmark ruling, the Montpellier court held EDF Renouvelables and nine of its subsidiaries responsible for the deaths of 160 bats and birds, especially lesser kestrels, which regularly collide with the blades despite deterrents put in place by operators.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If it's am unsolvable issue particularly with larger birds, then I guess it can't be helped. But to me it seems like this is one of those times where we overemphasize easily countable direct environmental impacts, whereas the diffuse statistical damages of fossil based power plants get ignored.

It might be next to impossible to calculate the impact one individual coal power plant has and how many birds (and other animals) die due to its carbon footprint. But that doesn't mean those aren't happening just because they don't die from flying against the building.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Some German wind turbines are actually turned off during specific hours when birds/bats are active and/or have cameras. Apparently, even painting one of the blades a dark color is extremely effective at helping birds orient themselves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That definitely sounds like something we'd do. I think I read somewhere that the difficulty with painting blades is that (especially with dark colors) it leads to them heating up more from sun exposure making differences in thermal expansion a potential issue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Huh, so now I know why nobody does it!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Key takeout:

The wind farm has been in operation since 2006 and generates the annual electricity needs of 60,000 people.

The Aumelas plateau was awarded the Natura 2000 label in 2016, which advocates the protection of areas that are representative of European biodiversity.

So it's ok to do a reassessment.
Possibly move the windmills somewhere else - reuse unrecyclable blades.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Or replace them with newer, taller wind turbines. Turbines get higher and higher to harvest higher winds, which are more reliable if I understand it correctly. But seems these also have less fatalities … if less birds fly at that hight.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We fixed this with glass, surely we can find a way with wind mills too. We just need to update these:

anti-collision window decal

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Bird stickers on the blade?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I have no clue what would work well, but I mean we figured it out right. I'm glad they are trying to save birds but turning them off all the time sounds so prehistoric.

Have you ever heard of a persistence of video display? It spins around a long led strip and all of a sudden an image appears because it spins round so fast your brain can't process the fact that it is a spinning string. It looks like this:

POV display

I mean, if we can make that and we can make windmills, surely we could generate power while also preventing birds from accidently killing themselves.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Question is if they can even see that. Such things are usually optimized for our eyes. It’s faster than our eye can handle and we blur it together, but I wouldn’t be surprised if (some) birds can see fast motions better than we do, after all they naturally travel at far higher speeds than we do.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I dig your ideas and and stance on looking for a solution. I don't think windmills go fast enough to achieve that effect, though just blinking LED strips might do the trick. I'm no bird lawyer per se, but I do believe their sight is different to ours.

You got my fantasy going, so now I'm imagining the windmills spouting some artificial clouds into the wind and lasers displaying birds of prey into the mist.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

While I appreciate your cyberpunky laser neon fog enthusiasm, I'd really like to know how to actually fix this. After reading the Article, I think that simply painting a pattern with enough contrast and a way to enhance distance estimation would be good. Most of the ones I know are white with some small black elements at the tips, which is almost the worst I can imagine. I'd guess they simply can't estimate the distance, even if they see that the things are there. They don't have bad eyes, but the things are gigantic white planes with some light shading from the shape, but that probably just looks like a fuck off huge white-grey plane in terms of depth perception. Painting some marks on it to allow the parallax to make it obvious how big the distance between background and foreground is sounds like a super simple solution that might solve most of the problems. Then there's also the possibility that they ram themselves into the blades deliberately, because humans made their whole habitat a nightmare...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have no idea how birds see the world but laserwindmills sure sound cool, you could make something like that spraying dark spots in the sky like an octopus squirting ink. I mean if we can come up with these ideas then surely they can come up something that is less costly than turning them off all the time. Maybe just hire a bunch of artists and not only engineers, but I don't know to be honest, maybe they've been trying really hard to figure something out all this time already.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Without any googling whatsoever I am pretty sure there have been studies on the matter. My guess is either there is no trivial solution or something that would go against efficiency.

There is definitely a big alternative wind energy movement about. I've seen designs on small scale that basically just wobble and generate power. Maybe we have to step back a bit, before we can go full in. We can't have slowly rotating blades chop up our birdies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Especially not the rare ones