“[The Obama] administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind-energy company, even those that flout the law repeatedly. Instead, the government is shielding the industry from liability and helping keep the scope of the [bird] deaths secret.”
– Dina Cappiello, “Obama Administration Allows Wind Farms to Kill Eagles, Birds Despite Federal Laws, Washington Post, May 14, 2013. [Note: WaPo scrubbed the article where the link does not work.]
“By accepting the compromises of the real world and enthusiastically supporting the establishment of the wind industry, [environmentalists] entered the devil’s bargain that now prevents them from fighting the power companies. . . . Here in the almost wilds of Altamont Pass, the environmentalists and Kenetech have reached the point where solutions become problems–the point at which there is blood on the answer.”
– Amy Linn, “Whirly Birds,” SF Weekly, March 29-April 4, 1995.
The Shared Narrative of windpower as “green” is under assault. What was relegated to the shadows in years and decades past is coming out as never before.
Earlier this month, AP environmental writer Dina Cappiello’s exposed the federal government’s double-environmental standard towards windpower. As such, she ‘mainstreamed’ the work of wind critics Robert Bryce, Paul Driessen, Sherri Lange, James Rust, Tom Tanton, Jim Wiegand, among others.
Is it open season and catch-up time regarding what is politely called windpower’s “avian mortality” problem? In Sunday’s New York Times, Felicity Barringer’s Turbine Plans Unnerve Fans of Condors in California quoted Kelly Fuller of the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) about how the U.S. Department of Interior’s new wind-turbine/bird policy “blindsided folks.” Fuller explained in a press release:
The Department of Interior has signaled today that it is willing to sacrifice the money and hard work that are spent on private conservation efforts to recover endangered species in order to build wind farms. ABC is extremely concerned about the negative effects that this decision could have not only on the condor recovery program, but also on other recovery programs that rely on public-private partnerships, such as for Whooping Cranes.
Can the double standard continue now that the illegalities have gone mainstream? Will the Sierra Club–originator of the term Cuisinarts of the Air–continue to look the other way at the problem? One hopes for a new beginning–and the long-deserved and long anticipated ungreening of industrial wind turbines.
SF Daily: Fringe Paper Exposé
The Cappiello AP story, carried across the country (including in the Washington Post), and the subject of numerous follow-up stories (Bryce, CEI, IER, etc.), brings to mind an earlier exposé that Big Wind managed to keep in the shadows. The summary below is reproduced from my 1997 essay for the Cato Institute, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green'” (profiled here).
An article in the March 29-April 4, 1995, issue of SF Weekly was particularly telling. The cover story in the San Francisco newspaper was no less than an exposé, written not by a free-market critic but by an author sympathetic to the environmental agenda.
The article concerns the world’s largest wind-power farm, the 625 MW Altamont Pass project, owned by independent developers with long-term purchase contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric. Some major points of the article follow. “It now appears that windmills are annually killing thousands of birds worldwide [including] . . . red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, turkey vultures, assorted owls–and federally protected species like Aquila chrysaetos, the golden eagle. And it turns out that the Bay Area . . . is the windmill bird-death capital of America.”
The National Audubon Society has called for a moratorium on new wind farms until the bird kill problem is solved, a position that the wind industry opposes.
Some of the bird kills at Altamont Pass are a federal crime under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; killing bald eagles is also a crime under the Bald Eagle Protection Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering prosecution.
Traditional environmental groups will not condemn wind, which they see as “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” They hope that the mortality is not too great and that current remediation efforts will succeed.
“So intense has the windmill ‘avian mortality issue’ become in wind and wildlife circles, some fear for their jobs if they speak out; others fear for their research dollars, while the companies fear for their futures.”
“How many dead birds equal a dead fish equals an oil spill?” asks the author. One wind energy expert responds, “The trade-offs aren’t easy–there aren’t any charts or formulas to guide you.”
Environmentalists blocked a proposed wind farm in eastern Washington state because of the avian mortality problem.
Federal money is going toward trying to find a solution to the bird kill problem, such as a study by the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Author Amy Linn pointedly concludes her article:
By accepting the compromises of the real world and enthusiastically supporting the establishment of the wind industry, [environmentalists] entered the devil’s bargain that now prevents them from fighting the power companies. . . . Here in the almost wilds of Altamont Pass, the environmentalists and Kenetech have reached the point where solutions become problems–the point at which there is blood on the answer.
From Dina Cappiello back to Amy Linn … Can environmentalists now look at wind power with their green glasses on? One can only hope so.
Appendix: Wind Farms Get Pass on Eagle Deaths
Cappiello reports from Converse County, Wyoming.
“It happens about once a month here, on the barren foothills of one of America’s green-energy boomtowns: A soaring golden eagle slams into a wind farm’s spinning turbine and falls, mangled and lifeless, to the ground. Killing these iconic birds is not just an irreplaceable loss for a vulnerable species. It’s also a federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines.”
“[The Obama] administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind-energy company, even those that flout the law repeatedly. Instead, the government is shielding the industry from liability and helping keep the scope of the deaths secret.”
“Wind power, a pollution-free energy intended to ease global warming, is a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s energy plan. His administration has championed a $1 billion-a-year tax break to the industry that has nearly doubled the amount of wind power in his first term. But like the oil industry under President George W. Bush, lobbyists and executives have used their favored status to help steer U.S. energy policy.”
“The result [of Obama energy policy] is a green industry that’s allowed to do not-so-green things. It kills protected species with impunity and conceals the environmental consequences of sprawling wind farms.”
“More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country’s wind farms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin. Getting precise figures is impossible because many companies aren’t required to disclose how many birds they kill. And when they do, experts say, the data can be unreliable.”
“When companies voluntarily report deaths, the Obama administration in many cases refuses to make the information public, saying it belongs to the energy companies or that revealing it would expose trade secrets or implicate ongoing enforcement investigations.”
“Nearly all the birds being killed [by wind turbines] are protected under federal environmental laws, which prosecutors have used to generate tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from businesses, including oil and gas companies, over the past five years.”
“‘We are all responsible for protecting our wildlife, even the largest of corporations,’ Colorado U.S. Attorney David M. Gaouette said in 2009 when announcing Exxon Mobil had pleaded guilty and would pay $600,000 for killing 85 birds in five states, including Wyoming.”
“The large death toll at wind farms shows how the renewable energy rush comes with its own environmental consequences, trade-offs the Obama administration is willing to make in the name of cleaner energy. ‘It is the rationale that we have to get off of carbon, we have to get off of fossil fuels, that allows them to justify this,” said Tom Dougherty, a long-time environmentalist who worked for nearly 20 years for the National Wildlife Federation in the West, until his retirement in 2008. “But at what cost? In this case, the cost is too high’.”
“The Obama administration has refused to accept [the cost of mitigating bird deaths] when the fossil-fuel industry is to blame. The BP oil company was fined $100 million for killing and harming migratory birds during the 2010 Gulf oil spill. And PacifiCorp, which operates coal plants in Wyoming, paid more than $10.5 million in 2009 for electrocuting 232 eagles along power lines and at its substations. But PacifiCorp also operates wind farms in the state, where at least 20 eagles have been found dead in recent years, according to corporate surveys submitted to the federal government and obtained by The Associated Press. They’ve neither been fined nor prosecuted. A spokesman for PacifiCorp, which is a subsidiary of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. of Des Moines, Iowa, said that’s because its turbines may not be to blame.”
“‘What it boils down to is this: If you electrocute an eagle, that is bad, but if you chop it to pieces, that is OK,’ said Tim Eicher, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agent based in Cody, who helped prosecute the PacifiCorp power line case.”
“By not enforcing [federal laws], the administration provides little incentive for companies to build wind farms where there are fewer birds. And while companies already operating turbines are supposed to avoid killing birds, in reality there’s little they can do once the windmills are spinning.”
“Wind farms are clusters of turbines as tall as 30-story buildings, with spinning rotors the size of jetliners. Though the blades appear to move slowly, they can reach speeds up to 170 mph at the tips, creating tornado-like vortexes. Flying eagles behave like drivers texting on their cellphones; they don’t look up. As they scan for food, they don’t notice the industrial turbine blades until it’s too late.”
“The rehabilitation coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program, Michael Tincher, said he euthanized two golden eagles found starving and near death near wind farms. Both had injuries he’d never seen before: One of their wings appeared to be twisted off. ‘There is nothing in the evolution of eagles that would come near to describing a wind turbine. There has never been an opportunity to adapt to that sort of threat,’ said Grainger Hunt, an eagle expert who researches the U.S. wind-power industry’s deadliest location, a northern California area known as Altamont Pass. Wind farms built there decades ago kill more than 60 per year.”
“Eagle deaths have forced the Obama administration into a difficult choice between its unbridled support for wind energy and enforcing environmental laws that could slow the industry’s growth.”
“Former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in an interview with the AP before his departure, denied any preferential treatment for wind [power relative to bird laws]. Interior Department officials said that criminal prosecution, regardless of the industry, is always a ‘last resort’. ‘There’s still additional work to be done with eagles and other avian species, but we are working on it very hard,’ Salazar said. ‘We will get to the right balance’.”
“[T]he Obama administration has proposed a rule that would give wind-energy companies potentially decades of shelter from prosecution for killing eagles. The regulation is currently under review at the White House. The proposal, made at the urging of the wind-energy industry, would allow companies to apply for 30-year permits to kill a set number of bald or golden eagles. Previously, companies were only eligible for five-year permits. In exchange for the longer timetable, companies agree that if they kill more eagles than allowed, the government could require them to make changes. But the administration recently said it would cap how much a company could be forced to spend on finding ways to reduce the number of eagles its facility is killing.”
“The Obama administration said the longer permit was needed to ‘facilitate responsible development of renewable energy’ while “continuing to protect eagles. That’s because without a long-term authorization to kill eagles, investors are less likely to finance an industry that’s violating the law.”
“Typically, the government would be forced to study the environmental effects of such a regulation before implementing it. In this case, though, the Obama administration avoided a full review, saying the policy was nothing more than an ‘administrative change.’ ‘It’s basically guaranteeing a black box for 30 years, and they’re saying “trust us for oversight.” This is not the path forward,’ said Katie Umekubo, a renewable energy attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and a former lawyer for the Fish and Wildlife Service. In private meetings with industry and government leaders in recent months, environmental groups have argued that the 30-year permit needed an in-depth environmental review.”
“The tactics have created an unexpected rift between the administration and major environmental groups favoring green energy that, until the eagle rule, had often been on the same side as the wind industry. Those conservation groups that have been critical of the administration’s stance from the start, such as the American Bird Conservancy, have often been cut out of the behind-the-scenes discussions and struggled to obtain information on bird deaths at wind farms.”
“‘There are no seats at the exclusive decision-making table for groups that want the wind industry to be held accountable for the birds it kills,’ said Kelly Fuller, who works on wind issues for the group.”
“The eagle rule is not the first time the administration has made concessions for the wind-energy industry. Last year, over objections from some of its own wildlife investigators and biologists, the Interior Department updated its guidelines and provided more cover for wind companies that violate the law.”
“The administration and some environmentalists say that was the only way to exact some oversight over an industry that operates almost exclusively on private land and generates no pollution, and therefore is exposed to little environmental regulation. Under both the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, the death of a single bird without a permit is illegal.”
“[U]nder the Obama administration’s new guidelines, wind-energy companies — and only wind-energy companies — are held to a different standard. Their facilities don’t face additional scrutiny until they have a ‘significant adverse impact’ on wildlife or habitat. But under both bird protection laws, any impact has to be addressed. The rare exception for one industry substantially weakened the government’s ability to enforce the law and ignited controversy inside the Interior Department.”
“‘U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not do this for the electric utility industry or other industries,’ Kevin Kritz, a government wildlife biologist in the Rocky Mountain region wrote in government records in September 2011. ‘Other industries will want to be judged on a similar standard.'”
“Experts working for the agency in California and Nevada wrote in government records in June 2011 that the new federal guidelines should be considered as though they were put together by corporations, since they ‘accommodate the renewable energy industry’s proposals, without due accountability.’ The Obama administration, however, repeatedly overruled its experts at the Fish and Wildlife Service. In the end, the wind-energy industry, which was part of the committee that drafted and edited the guidelines, got almost everything it wanted.”
“‘Clearly, there was a bias to wind energy in their favor because they are a renewable source of energy, and justifiably so,’ said Rob Manes, who runs the Kansas office for The Nature Conservancy and who served on the committee. ‘We need renewable energy in this country.'”
“Normally, law-enforcement agents in the field have the authority to file charges with federal attorneys. While all big cases are typically cleared through headquarters, such a blanket policy has never been applied to an entire industry, former officials said. ‘It’s over,’ Eicher said. ‘You’ll never see a prosecution now.’ Not so, says the Fish and Wildlife Service. It said it is investigating 18 bird-death cases involving wind-power facilities, and seven have been referred to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to discuss the status of those cases.”
“Dan Ashe, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s director, in an interview Monday with The Associated Press said his agency always made it clear to wind companies that if they kill birds they would still be liable. ‘We are not allowing them to do it. They do it,” he said of the bird deaths.’ And we will successfully prosecute wind companies if they are in significant noncompliance.'”
“[Federal] officials acknowledge that their priority is cooperating with companies before wind farms are built to encourage them to be put where they won’t harm birds. Once they are built, there is little companies can do except shut down turbines or remove them — and that means reducing the amount of electricity they generate and violating deals struck with companies purchasing their electricity. By contrast, there are easy fixes for oil companies and companies operating power lines to stop killing birds. The government often requests companies take such steps before it decides to prosecute. ‘We just can’t be bringing a criminal case against a company that is up and running if there is not a solution,’ said Jill Birchell, head of the Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement office in California and Nevada. ‘We can fine them, but that doesn’t help eagles.'”
“In the meantime, birds continue to die. The golden eagle population in the West, prior to the wind energy boom, was declining so much that the government’s conservation goal in 2009 was not to allow the eagle population to decrease by a single bird. The reason boils down to biology. Eagles take five years to reach the age when they can reproduce, and often they only produce one chick a year. In its defense, the wind-energy industry points out that more eagles are killed each year by cars, electrocutions and poisoning than by turbines.”
“Documents and emails obtained by the AP offer glimpses of the problem: 14 deaths at seven facilities in California, five each in New Mexico and Oregon, one in Washington state and another in Nevada, where an eagle was found with a hole in its neck, exposing the bone. Unlike the estimates, these are hard numbers, proof of deaths, the beginnings of a mosaic revealing the problem.”
“One of the deadliest places in the country for golden eagles is Wyoming, where federal officials said wind farms have killed more than four dozen golden eagles since 2009, predominantly in the southeastern part of the state. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the figures.”
“The Interior Department recently approved construction of the nation’s largest wind farm in Wyoming, with what would be 1,000 turbines. The federal government predicts that project, which was analyzed because it was on federal land, would kill 46 to 64 eagles each year.”
“At … Duke Energy’s Top of the World wind farm, a 17,000-acre site with 110 turbines located about 35 miles east of Casper, 10 eagles have been killed in the first two years of operation. It is the deadliest of Duke’s 15 wind power plants for eagles. The company’s environmental director for renewable energy, Tim Hayes, said Duke is doing all it can, not only because it wants to fix the problem but because it could reduce the company’s liability. Two of the company’s wind farms in Wyoming — Top of the World and Campbell Hill — are under investigation by the federal government for the deaths of golden eagles and other birds, according to a report the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week. The report was filed after the AP visited a Duke facility in Wyoming and asked senior executives about the deaths.”
“Duke [Energy] encourages workers to drive slower so as not to scare eagles from their roosts. They remove dead animals that eagles eat. And they’ve removed rock piles where the bird’s prey lives. They also keep internal data on every dead bird in order to determine whether these efforts are working. The company is also testing radar technology to detect eagles and is considering blaring loud noises to prevent the birds from flying into danger. The only other option is shutting off the turbines when eagles approach. And even that method hasn’t been scientifically proven to work.”
“At Top of the World, Duke [Energy] shut down 13 turbines for a week in March, often the deadliest time for eagles. The experiment, the company says, paid off. Not a single eagle was killed that month. [Tim] Hayes says the company has repeatedly sought a permit from the federal government to kill eagles legally, but was told it was killing too many to qualify.”
“When an eagle is killed, Duke employees are also prohibited by law from removing the carcass. Each death is a tiny crime scene. So workers walk out underneath the spinning rotors and cover the dead bird with a tarp. It lies there, protected from scavengers but decaying underneath its shroud, until someone from the government comes to get it.”
———
The link to the Washington Post article is broken.
Nick: Yes it is–seems to be a problem on the WP end. I just removed the hyperlink.
No doubt the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) conducted a campaign to get newspapers to delink the piece. Big Wind with deep pockets at work!
The truth about the eagle kill numbers given in this article is that they are actually much higher.
With voluntary regulations and no accountability, the industry routinely lies or gives half truths about this terrible impact. If they have reported 10 dead golden eagles from Wyoming in hand, the real toll is far greater because the mortally wounded travel great distances and are never found. Even the number dead golden eagles found Altamont have an estimated mortality to be many times the actual body count. At Altamont over a 5 year period 54 golden eagle carcasses were collected (10.8 per year) and the death toll to golden eagles was estimated to be 75 -116 golden eagles per year. This is 7 to 10 times as many as the actual body count.
People need to understand that there is a huge difference between eagles “found dead” and the actual death rate to this species. The industry and the FWS know exactly what I am talking about. This is an example of how the public is being lied to.
Then did it ever occur to anybody that the industry is actually reporting eagles killed by wind turbines as power line electrocutions? Look at the numbers given in Wyoming. 232 electruced eagles. At Altamont the same 5 year study determined only 2 of the eagles found had been electrocuted (they also do not wander) but estimated a yearly wind turbine death toll at 75-116. Another study by Grainger Hunt on radio tagged golden eagles found that golden eagles were killed by wind turbines at a rate about 2.5 times more than by electrocution. When looking at these numbers, it is easy to understand how much more dangerous turbines are than transmission lines.
These eagle electrocution numbers from Wyoming look very suspicious when compared to the small number given for wind turbine deaths and I would like readers to look at this very suspicious article from Texas. It is a story about 7 bald eagles supposedly being electrocuted. I believe most, if not all, of these bald eagles were killed by wind turbines. But word had gotten out, so a story had to be created……… http://www.outdoorhub.com/news/higher-number-of-bald-eagle-deaths-in-texas-concern-fish-and-wildlife-service-despite-increasing-population/
One has to keep in mind the industry has “voluntary regulations’ (no accountability). I cannot find one report of an eagle being killed by wind turbines in this state even though they have far more installed wind turbine capacity located in eagle habitat. This may seem like a stretch to some but when you have looked at the lies, the silent fraud, and the completely fraudulent wind industry studies I have seen, it is a good bet to always assume they(wind industry and FWS) are lying. Another trend I have seen over the years is that power lines are always discussed in the literature from the wind industry and FWS “as being” deadly, but wind turbines are always discussed in terms such as “possibly being”, “may cause”, “could be”, “unlikely occurrence” or they are not not even mentioned. Pay attention to this canned statement from the Texas article………..”
But now, FWS agents are worrying that eagles may face an additional threat from electrocutions or collisions with power lines and poles in six Texas counties, and that’s just counting the birds they’ve been able to find. Ortego believes the death rate to be higher”. Not a word about turbines, the guy is clearly covering for the industry by not mentioning turbines.
Folks, we have a real problem here. The wind industry is wiping out our bird populations and your government agencies entrusted to protect these species are in on it.
In the New York Times article “Turbine Plans Unnerve Fans of Condors In California” it states,
“It has been 46 years since the condor — a bald, black carrion-eater that can fly nearly three miles high on wings that span up to 10 feet — was declared endangered. In that time, the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service has almost never waived criminal penalties for the “taking,” or killing, of a condor.
Is there a list of condors reported taken, and penalized guilty parties, punishment meted out, the proximate cause of death, that sort of thing?
If another prominent republican comes to California and doesn’t mention the open season declared on California’s Condors by the Obama Interior Department, like Rand Paul the other day…
You might as well not come. It will be a wasted trip for you.
Jim W. There is one map where the condor’s flight paths are plotted. All of the plots just sort of huggin up to but not penetrating the windfarm area.
I interpret that as there are no survivors of a trip into the windfarm. What do you think?
Jim W again. In the article Big Wind and Avian Mortality you say in a bullet point , “Avoid searching near some of the most dangerous and lethal turbines.”
If industry is lying about it, covering up, how can you tell which turbines are most dangerous and lethal?
[…] http://www.masterresource.org/2013/05/ungreening-windpower-cappiello/#more-25672 […]
“But word had gotten out, so a story had to be created……… http://www.outdoorhub.com/news/higher-number-of-bald-eagle-deaths-in-texas-concern-fish-and-wildlife-service-despite-increasing-population/“………… Since posting this a few days ago, the article has now been deleted from the internet.
Do we know how many birds are killed by other industries? How about by powerlines, destruction of habitat by urban development, and other anthropeogenic activties?
We all like to have our conveniences, like flicking on a switch and having the light turn on – like magic. Electricity has to come from somewhere, be it coal, hydro, wind, nuclear, solar, etc. adn all have their impacts. I don’t see a lot of people rushing out to buy solar panels to put on their roofs for micro-generation to reduce our reliance on other power sources, but I sure do see a lot of complaining and comments about what should be produced.
Improvements can always be made, and having worked in industry, I can certainly say that the people operating these facilities do not want to have mortalities for many, many reasons. To say nothing is being done to reduce the numbers of mortalities is a ridiculous claim.
These facilities exist in order to make power to meet the demands of us, the consumer. If people are really against them, then look at ways to produce your own power.
Steve:
The complaint against wind power is that it is wholly unnecessary for economic and energy reasons and thus every little thing that goes with it is unnecessary.
The other things that kill or despoil in some way are necessary (like windows).