[skyfaller]

Paging Low-Tech Magazine! I wonder how they feel about these partly wooden turbines:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/reinventing-the-sm...

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/how-to-make-wind-p...

I expect they would be disappointed that it's not all wood, and also skeptical of these being mass-produced with engineered wood rather than made by local artisans out of regular wood. Can the wood parts be recycled or composted? What happens at the end of life?

To quote Low-Tech Mag on composite blades, "The environmental damage of the carbon-epoxy spars can be viewed as acceptable, if compared to the larger damage done by conventional wind turbine blades. However, the waste problem would not be solved, and further growth in wind power would still result in ever larger waste streams."

[Gare]

> If wind would supply a more desirable 40% of (current) power demand, there would be three to four million tonnes of waste per year.

For comparison, New York City produces 14 million tons of waste per year. Doesn't seem as dramatic when put in context.

[lovecg]

It’s like that scare mongering about wind turbines killing hundreds of thousands of birds per year. It’s laughable when compared with billions of birds that _cats_ kill.

Any discussion of this topic is ripe with emotionally charged misstatements, I’m careful about taking anything at face value anymore.

[internetter]

Cats kill between 1.3 and 4.0 billion birds a year: https://dariuszzdziebk.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/upload...

— Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute & U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

From https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds

- Wind turbines kill something around a million birds every year

- Power lines kill something around 25 times that

- And "A 2012 study found that wind projects kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, compared to 5.18 birds killed per gigawatt-hour of electricity from fossil fuel projects"

[lovecg]

Well one thing that occurred to me is this argument could hold water if the wind turbines somehow drastically differ in the kinds of birds they kill. E.g. if they kill a million of some rare species that’s not killed by anything else that could be different. But I haven’t seen any data on that.

[nkurz]

I think it's talked about fairly often. Wind turbines kill many more raptors (eagles and hawks) than cats do. Here's some data: https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/02/19/number-of-eagles-kil...