Wildlife and wind turbines

[Warhammer1]

cant be a bad as a planet killing nuclear plant meltdown.... the turbines help offset the need to build five to ten nuclear plants in Southern Ont.

[TPM]

cant be a bad as a planet killing nuclear plant meltdown.... the turbines help offset the need to build five to ten nuclear plants in Southern Ont.

True, wind turbines help off-set the need for other methods of power generation but I think your numbers are a bit off. There are currently only two nuclear power plants in all of Ontario and they can supply 50-60% of our Province's power needs. It would take about 35,000 wind turbines working at peak efficiency (which won't happen in Southern Ontario) to even come close to matching what a nuclear plant can put out. Wind power is a good way to suppliment our needs but I don't think it will ever replace traditional methods in this part of the world.

[one shot scott]

sadly windturbines are not as great as they first seem. dont even get me started on Dolton Mc Squintie placing these things wherever he wants and how many he wants without taxpayer input.

As for wildlife? they are hell on birds. Deer I have no idea but they make hunting items now to eliminate the electronic impulses of a human heart on the "idea" deer can sense it.(Im not sold on this idea btw..yet) I gots ta beleive that a wind turbine has a wack more magnetic impulse than a human heart

[OkXbowHunter]

Just make a daily visit around them to pick up the dead game birds. Leave the dead song birds for the Tree Huggers to bury in the woods...

[philman]

I have heard that they kill a lot of bats.

[shafferm]

The number of bird kills you will see will depend on what type of turbines they are installing. If they put in the newer larger slower rotating designed turbines then the bird kills should be quite low. The older earlier faster rotating designs were much harder on bird populations.

Some turbines also put out a low frequency hum that can be felt for quite a distance from the turbine site.

This article makes a great, if not long, read on bird strikes and wind turbines.

"Avian Collisions with Wind Turbines: A Summary of Existing Studies and Comparisons to Other Sources of Avian Collision Mortality in the United States"

http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/d ... 9-1042.pdf

[GaryM]

A friend of mine owned a cabin that was in the shadow of a 1200' TV tower. In the fall you could walk around under the tower an pick up the dead ducks that hit the guy wires. It seemed like most, if not all of the birds were hitting the wires at night. Gary

[Bill T]

The whole wind turbine thing reeks of Toronto and I hate it. They are being shoved down our throats in Garafraxa Twp near Fergus, just another symptom of the urban majority salving it's concience by "going green" at our expense. I'm not against being enviromentally sensitive in any way, but the figures I've seen show that these eyesores do very little to reduce Ontario's dependency of conventional power generation.

[Pydpiper]

A couple weeks ago we took a trip to go check some of these things out, part of the plan was to look for any affect on wildlife. We went under 3, and 5 of us could not find any sign of dead stuff, and we looked hard. VERY impressive machines!

[nc crossbow]

My Uncle lives in Western NY just outside of Attica NY and there are 3 large wind farms in the area. When I visited the area we counted over 20 deer underneath quite a few of these behemoths and they didn't seem bothered in the least. I've also ridden my Harley in the past near these behemoths and the deer were actually more interested in the Rinehart exhaust I have mounted on it. The deer had no problems adapting to the windmills and still raid the fields whenever they can.