> Aeromine said unlike conventional wind turbines that are noisy, visually intrusive, and dangerous to migratory birds, the patented system is motionless and virtually silent.
I've been a supporter of wind energy for 30 years and it's my favorite generation source. I want to believe the claims of this company, but the above quote is activating my spidey senses. Conventional wind turbines are not a serious threat to birds. According to Homebrew Wind Power by Dan Bartmann and Dan Fink, here are the causes of bird fatalities per 10000 fatalities (page 28):
5500 Buildings / Windows
1000 Cats
1000 Other
800 Power Lines
700 Vehicles
700 Pesticides
250 Communication Towers
<1 Wind Turbines
Many other sources agree.
Any wind turbine company will know this. For one to spread this lie makes me doubt their other claims. I hope they're right about price per watt but I have serious doubts.
That said, I would LOVE to have affordable grid-tied residential wind to complement my rooftop solar. It's not an easy problem to solve.
I can't speak to the technology, but their CEO and marketing staff have been aggressively crapping on other clean energy sources. They also repeated a lot of lies about solar. I hope the tech is real, the people behind it seem like jerks.
The estimate for cats is widely disputed and was a complete WAG with little empirical backing and more like extrapolation from a non-representative sample. There are studies currently in progress to more accurately measure the impact of cats upon bird populations and last I saw the results were showing the prior estimates were grossly overestimated because cats kill many more kinds of animals than just birds like squirrels, lizards, and rodents.
Also, I have a 9kw solar setup and simply can’t add more without sacrificing land or basically tearing my house down to make a new, more optimal roof, at which point all the environmental pros of using solar are more than wiped out by the construction carbon footprint. Old homes really are terrible oftentimes for solar installations, sadly.
Domestic cats should be illegal anywhere outside of a major city. It’s such low hanging fruit in reducing loss of small native animals, with virtually no downside.
In my experience, it very much depends on the individual cat. Besides general levels of hunting competence overall, cats seem to have a good bit of variety in their preferred prey types. Some catch everything, but some specialize in small rodents (never catching birds) and others I have know did catch primarily birds. I had one who loved young rabbits above all else, and I've even known some for whom a nice fat moth was the gourmet treat above any.
The exact numbers re: what kills birds here aren't really what matters. What matters is the relative orders of magnitude. Even if the number for cats is a WAG and wildly off by a factor of 2 in either direction, we can safely say that buildings and windows are far more dangerous to birds than Felis catus.
If cats are in fact half as dangerous to birds as estimated, then the danger is still of the same order of magnitude as that from power lines, vehicles, and pesticides. If they are twice as dangerous as estimated, then the danger is still not far off from those other things in terms of order of magnitude.
Ultimately, these things are all factors to keep in mind in terms of how we can prioritize actions that benefit the bird population.
TL;DR: focus on orders of magnitude here, don't get fixated on exact numbers.
I think part of my point should be taken further that we don’t even have the correct order of magnitude for cats and the numbers for windmills are so small it’s probably negligible although care should be taken to see if there is some disproportionate externalities observable now such as when Australia changed its own ecosystems with changes to farming practices. What isn’t under so much debate though that does unequivocally matter is the amount of land necessary to convert to renewables which is a function of energy density in urban areas where land use is much more expensive and total energy used per area is quite high. While systems do get more efficient over time the efficiency isn’t exponential and portable energy is a big issue that is mostly orthogonal to renewable sources in funding mechanisms yet also part of the incredibly complex energy supply chain of the world economy.
Presumably that’s a 9kWp system, with peak potential on a good day to generate 9kW at the optimal time of the day
Is there any way to work out how many kWh such a system would tend to generate for a given latitude throughout the year? If I wanted to charge a 10kWh battery once a day for 12 months what kWp system would I need. What would it produce in June vs December etc.
The main issues are cloudy days, and angle of the sun. Do you still want to fully charge that battery on cloudy days? If not, then you need to size the battery based on how many cloudy days in a row you can tolerate before needing to cut back on energy use.
The angle of the sun affects the number of hours of sunlight in the day, as well as the angle of incidence to the panel (and you can adjust the panel angle). The default is to angle your panels equal to your latitude. If you angle them more horizontal, you will have more summer generation. If you angle them more vertical, you will have more winter generation. Which is your design constraint - heating or air conditioning loads? You can also use adjustable mounts that can be changed over the year. When I ran this for myself, adjusting the panels a few times a year would only net me a negligible amount of additional generation.
There's so much we take for granted with the grid abstraction. Net metering was a huge subsidy to drive adoption of solar, but ultimately if you want a truly independent setup you need to think like an off gridder. The hard truth is that you're probably better off designing for the 95% or whatever common case, and falling back to a gas generator for the few times conditions are worse.
There’s websites to calculate it based upon satellite photos of your roof alone (what the installer and system designers did for me along with permitting that would have taken me far too much time / effort). Your panel type, inverter, etc. all matter as well. A meter to determine your electricity usage throughout the year is good to have as well although I didn’t do that before I installed my system and expected to try to size a battery backup system only once I had sufficient data. But basically so far my house is pretty much a dud in terms of ROI for any more modernization efforts without tearing it down basically and this is what I’ve been thinking about a lot more than the usual trend of renewables and such. Old homes in the US are really, really, really hard to retrofit remotely economically and are burdens upon the energy grid and infrastructure throughout the lifetime of the structures. The costs fall disproportionately upon our population that can least afford it as well and subsidies are laughably minuscule and mostly taken by more affluent homeowners in practice.
I'm not sure how to interpret these statistics. Since it's given per 10000 fatalities (and not per square meter covered in said obstacle), can't you conclude that the wind turbine fatalities are so low because we haven't deployed many of them? Whereas there are tons of buildings?
I suppose that if fewer than 1/10000 birds are killed by an X number of wind turbines, then we could guesstimate that fewer than 1/5000 birds will be killed by 2X number of wind turbines in a given area.
Wind power accounts for about 10% of total generation in the US. So even if turbines were added to account for 100% generation, and demand increased 10x, it'd still be far less than anything else on the list.
Surely those stats depend on the prevalence or absence of wind turbines. So if we had as many turbines as buildings they may well be a greater cause of bird deaths.
Wind power is responsible for something like 5% of generated electricity in the world. If we scale it 1000x, to reach the cat level, we'll have enough electricity to power 50 Earths :)
More like 20 earths. “5% of generated electricity” isn’t “5% of energy use”, by a decent margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power: “In 2021, wind supplied over 1800 TWh of electricity, which was over 6% of world electricity and about 2% of world energy”
Yes. In most applications, literally 45-70% of the fossil fuel is burned just to generate waste heat. This is a huge advantage for renewables, where it doesn't matter that you're not capturing all the energy in the wind going past, because it's not being consumed or generating waste.
From what I understand, one of the big bird issues with turbines is that birds of prey like hawks, eagles, and falcons don't generally look forward but down as they scout for prey, and thus are likely to fly into turbine blades. I believe some turbines have cameras systems to detect birds in the vicinity of the blades and either make a noise to alert the bird or maybe even bring the turbine to a halt.
This is really only an issue for large scale installations though, obviously wouldn't apply to low lying roof installations.
The bearded vulture is one of Europe's largest birds, it rarely comes to The Netherlands, living mainly in Spain and France. When it does comes to The Netherlands, about once every 3 years, it'll be a national news item as it's quite a spectacular bird. Last year one came, and not a week later it was found dead under a wind turbine.
That bird is not just a statistic, it was the single bird of one particular species in our country, and it flew into one of the few wind turbines we have.
I'm 100% for wind turbines, I think it's a magnificent sight every time I cross the afsluitdijk seeing them rise from the mists providing us with clean future proof energy. But the sort of stupidity that drives an engineer to say only 1 in 10000 bird deaths is due to wind turbines, without asking why or how or what bird is going to be the end of us all one day.
Afsluit = "close off". Dijk = "dike" (pronounced the same too). It's a 20 mile long dike we've built that closes off what used to be the South Sea from the North Sea, turning it into a big lake that's called the IJsselmeer.
It's all the QWERTY home-row letters making it look that way, I think. Does look a lot like a quick slam of the fingers on the keyboard to generate a "random" string.
Are you really 100% for wind turbines then?? Is there a way to make them less harmful to birds? Maybe keeping the speed lower? Maybe putting up some more static installations that keep birds away? (Like, say, bright trailers on the fan blades? Is that a real idea?)
Yeah there's research being done on multiple solutions. One of them is painting one of the blades a different color which helps somehow. I don't see how there couldn't be a technical solution, it's not like these turbines are on a tight budget. It could be as complex as having autonomous drones chase away birds if nothing else works.
True. About 50.000 birds die due to windmills per year in The Netherlands, so according to this stat we should have 500M birds. So the odds of it killing a specific bird is roughly 50.000/500M=0.01% chance. So we'd expect it to happen once every 10.000 years. Guess we got unlucky last year..
But the statistics can also be deceiving if presented like that, just like you said if people don’t stop and think about which specific birds they kill.
For example let’s say windmills kill 100,000 birds a year and let’s say that is 0.1% of all birds. That looks acceptable. Well 90,000 of those might be seagulls and represent perhaps 1% of seagulls and 9,000 might be eagles representing perhaps 50% of all eagles.
I pulled these numbers out of a hat but all that to say we shouldn’t lump rare birds together with abundant ones.
On this particular vulture (my apologies for looking the way the story is told makes it sound like one of the "They can’t have cows feed under those because it, it causes some kind of birth defects. This is what my sister who has cattle was telling me." ( https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/white-gold/... ))...
> With certain bird populations like the Bearded Vulture growing, birds can disperse in unusual habitats, and it is critical to find solutions to mitigate such threats. Operators need to develop shut down on demand processes and be willing to cooperate with conservationists to avoid accidents and help save birds. Furthermore, wind farms should implement mitigation measures to help prevent collisions such as equipping deterrent devices and even painting a single wind turbine blade black as a recent study suggests, however, more research is necessary to determine the effectiveness of this anti-collision measure. To safeguard biodiversity, conservationist should work alongside the energy sector to find solutions and prevent such accidents.
> Now comes research in the journal Biological Conservation on an automated system that scans the skies and can turn off a windmill if a bald or golden eagle is headed toward a deadly collision. Researchers from The Peregrine Fund, Western EcoSystems Technology and American Wind Wildlife Institute used human observers and photographs to see how well the camera-based monitoring system called IdentiFlight could detect, classify and track birds.
> The IdentiFlight system detected 96% of birds detected by observers and 562% more birds than observers. It's not perfect; the system misclassified nine of 149 eagles, for a false negative rate of 6%., with a false positive rate of 28% for misclassifying 278 of 1,013 eagles. Birds were classified as eagles by the system at a median distance of 793 meters (about a half a mile), and detected and classified in less than half a second.
So I don't have to read the article, what is the swept area compared to a conventional wind turbine? My limited understanding is that what really counts.
Also, my other limited understanding is you have to be at least 50 feet above the rooftop, any lower and wind is too turbulent.
> The scalable, “motionless” wind energy unit can produce 50% more energy than rooftop solar at the same cost
> An Aeromine system typically consists of 20 to 40 units installed on the edge of a building facing the predominant wind direction
I'd like to know how well it performs in variable wind directions vs variable sun directions for solar. Obviously location dependent but I'm guessing the figures quoted are best case scenarios.
I've been a supporter of wind energy for 30 years and it's my favorite generation source. I want to believe the claims of this company, but the above quote is activating my spidey senses. Conventional wind turbines are not a serious threat to birds. According to Homebrew Wind Power by Dan Bartmann and Dan Fink, here are the causes of bird fatalities per 10000 fatalities (page 28):
Many other sources agree.Any wind turbine company will know this. For one to spread this lie makes me doubt their other claims. I hope they're right about price per watt but I have serious doubts.
That said, I would LOVE to have affordable grid-tied residential wind to complement my rooftop solar. It's not an easy problem to solve.