When you watch this video, put on your critical thinking cap and consider the following questions:
- Are all birds equally important?
- Just because no power plant operates 100% of the time every year, does that mean that all of them are “intermittent” sources of power?
- Do you like the scale of the environmental impact pictured in the clips with off-shore installations, pumped storage systems, and ridge line wind farms?
- How fast to the ends of the blades of a slowly rotating turbine with 90 meter blades move?
- Why might the birds and bats killed by wind turbines be more important than the birds and bats killed by tall steel and glass office buildings?
I am looking forward to the discussion.
I cannot believe the attempt to dismiss intermittency in renewables with the argument that no power generator produces 100% of the time. The arguments is so weak, and depends so much on the assumed ignorance of the audience, that it demonstrates clearly the depth of the contempt these people have for the public.
It also demonstrates the desperation in that camp that they would feel that it was necessary to stoop to such cheap, and transparently ludicrous arguments in the attempt to salvage their case.
However, this time I believe they have overreached, because it seems that the public can see straight through this attempt at dissemination, mostly I believe because it is to little, to late.
First, consider the source of information — I noted KQED logo in the lower right hand side. Is this program compiled by Public Television? DV8’s point is spot-on, too. The ‘outages’ in coal and nuclear plants are planned events, mostly, while wind and solar vary daily, even hourly.
Second, they never include the cost of the storage ‘solution’ – whether it’s pumped hydro or compressed air (which hasn’t been demonstrated in a large scale yet, to my knowledge), nor do they account for the land-use footprint. If I were a devoted boater, I’d be incensed at the space occupied by the off-shore turbines.
Lastly, to equate bird kills by cats (a natural phenomenon) with stationary buildings (glass-sided seem to be the culprit) vs wind turbines betrays another weakness of their argument. I would say ‘no’ not all bird kills are the same: wind turbines tend to kill migratory birds and raptors (a smaller and more valuable portion of the avian food chain) more than garden variety ‘songbirds’.