I think your message was truncated, but you raise an interesting point
about birds in urban environments. The US Fish and Wildlife Service
(quoted in HBW Vol 10 Page 618) estimates 5 to 50 MILLION bird deaths
a year by hitting buildings in the US. As we have maybe 1/15th of the
US population I would expect the figures to be reduced by around that
amount here - but that still makes 300,000 plus a year. If that is
really true - and of course there are also the deaths through road
kill etc - then a windfarm probably has a fairly small effect -
although of course more "targeted" at different species who would
avoid urban areas.
On 4/10/06, Andrew Taylor <> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 02:00:57PM +1000, Evan Beaver wrote:
> > Have you driven out to the Capertee Valley? I propose that the Coal Fired
> > plants
> > and associated mining in the area is 20-30 times worse than the visual
> > pollution
> > created by the equivalent number of turbines.
>
> If you want to compare, remember the 2 power station near Lithgow
> (Wallerwang & Mt Piper) generate over 2Gw. The proposed Bald Hills
> wind farm maximum capacity was 90Mw (I believe) and as rule of thumb
> you divide that by three for a wind generation to get average generation.
>
> The proposal for Bald-Hills was about 50 turbines - large so far for
> an australian wind farm. You'd need roughly 60 such wind farms, 3000
> turbines of that type, to generate a similar amount of power to the
> huge coal power stations you see near Lithgow.
>
> On the other side of the equation, I read Bald Hills was largely
> agricultural land - which is not my idea of an unspoiled landscape.
>
> Saw by first flock of migrating Yellow-faced HE yesterday heading north
> through inner Sydney - braving power lines, TV towers and innumerable
> other flight obstacles, perhaps no wind turbines though. I would hav
>
> Andrew
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