Pierre Gosselin has found a new study showing bats really don’t want to be around wind turbines. The effect is so strong there are 20 times as many bats around normal comparable sites compared to sites with wind turbines.
I can’t imagine why bats with sensitive acoustic gear don’t like giant infrasonic blades, spinning at 200km per hour and carving a two acre sweep with every turn.
But when a turbine moves into the area, Bat-real-estate values must plummet:
The result of the study demonstrates a large effect on bat habitat use at wind turbines sites compared to control sites. Bat activity was 20 times higher at control sites compared to wind turbine sites, which suggests that habitat loss is an important impact to consider in wind farm planning.
…
What about the insects?
Since these are insect-eating bats, the next obvious question is whether mosquitoes are 20 times as common around wind turbines, or whether they hate the turbines too.
Has anyone even looked at this? Think of the possibilities: Are wind farms mosquito repellent, or will wind farms help spread dengue fever?
Apparently this was one of the first studies to look closely at the impact of wind farms on insectivorous bats in tropical hotspots. If so, we built some 350,000 wind turbines, then — then, we thought we might check to see if it affected bats?
Where. were. the environmentalists?
And doesn’t anyone care about mosquitoes…
REFERENCE
Millon et al (2018) Wind turbines impact bat activity, leading to high losses of habitat use in a biodiversity hotspot, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2017.12.024