The Daily Sceptic Chris Morrison
Solar farms, coming soon to a field near you, are an ecological disaster turning productive land into a nature dead zone. Birds frequently fly into the panels mistaking them for water, while electrocution and incineration are common. Blanketing large areas once open to sunlight causes massive habitat disruption and reduced insect numbers. Like the heavily-shaded ground beneath the miles of often Chinese-made panels, all of this is hidden by a mainstream media and governing class that are desperate to keep the Net Zero kite flying high.
“Bird mortality has become an unintended consequence of renewable energy development,” notes Hannah Vander Zanden, an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Florida. Little work has been done specifically on bird mortality at solar farms, although it is known that millions of bats and large birds of every kind are killed every year by giant wind turbines and their associated high power electricity lines. In recent work in California, Vander Zanden found that the birds killed at solar farms were often non-local, with peak kills during migratory periods in April and September. Britain, of course, is a haven for many migratory birds, large and small.
In 2023, the US Association of Avian Veterinarians published a “Conservation Note” titled ‘Solar Energy Production’s Toll on Wild Birds‘. It reported the estimate from the US Fish and Wildlife Services that yearly avian mortalities due to electrocution averaged 5.6 million and that some eight to 50 million bird mortalities may occur following collision with electrical lines. The construction of solar farms can lead to habitat destruction, the authors observe, and changes to plant composition and insect abundance, causing shifts in the diets of insectivorous birds.
The earliest scientific study of avian mortality at large scale utility solar plants was undertaken in 2016 by a group of scientists working for the US Government-funded Argonne National Laboratory. It was estimated that casualties at solar farms were similar to those found at wind turbine sites. Extrapolating from three large operations in southern California, the scientists suggested that between 37,800 and 138,600 birds died annually at solar parks across the US. These figures are of course nearly a decade old and appear on the low side. Whatever the true totals, there is evidence that between 2013 and 2022, US solar power generation rose 12-fold…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (dailysceptic.org)
Home | Caravan to Midnight (zutalk.com)
Be First to Comment