Warren Heath’s Recent Comments

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  Birds & Bats

  The issue is that in the rural areas bird and bat kills by the wind turbines and their associated high voltage transmission lines, as well as disruptions to their natural behavior, will have impact on the local ecosystems. This will include significant effects on insect population, since birds and bats consume large quantities of insects, which are harmful to vegetation, livestock and crops. This is orders of magnitude greater than the effects of cats or buildings in these local regions.

  It is erroneous and misleading to compare numbers of birds & bats killed in cities, with birds & bats killed in the rural areas where the turbines are located. In some regions, large numbers of rare raptors like golden eagles are being killed, it is hardly sensible to compare one golden eagle killed by a Wind Turbine in Altamont Pass, to a sparrow killed by a house cat in Los Angeles. House cats kill the weakest and smallest of birds, aiding in the natural selection process, and are balanced by the fact that many city residents, feed large numbers of birds.

  Florida Power & Light Co. abruptly cut off funding for a study of wind turbine bat kills and blocked access to researchers at all of it's industrial wind turbine facilities, when it became apparent the large number of bat kills by the turbines. Sounds like industrial Wind Turbine Companies have something to hide:

  
  "...Bats are incredibly important to humans and the ecosystem as a whole; each bat consumes approximately 2,000 insects nightly, and a lactating female bat will consume up to 3,000 insects each night..."
  "... If the 900 or so turbines proposed are built within a 70-mile radius [of Mountaineer] prior to finding solutions, it's very easy to extrapolate from this data that close to 60,000 bats could be killed every year," Tuttle said. "That's very likely not an ecologically sustainable kill rate; it's urgent to find a solution..."

  FPL blocks research on Bat Kills by it's Industrial Wind Turbine Facilities

  Well I guess, we can just increase our use of environmentally destructive insecticides to make up for all of the dead birds and bats in rural areas.

  Raptor kills by Wind Turbines in Altamont Pass
  On Wind power in China is 'huge, huge, huge' posted 1 year, 3 months ago 5 Responses