Spanish wind farms kill 6 to 18 million birds & bats a year

Spanish wind farms kill 6 to 18 million birds & bats a year:

“On 12 January 2012, at the First Scientific Congress on Wind Energy and Wildlife Conservation in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, the Spanish Society of Ornithology (SEO/Birdlife) made public its estimate that, yearly, Spain’s 18,000 wind turbines may be killing 6 to 18 million birds and bats. The average per turbine comes down to 333 – 1,000 deaths annually, which is a far cry from the 2 – 4 birds claimed by the American wind industry, or the 400,000 birds a year estimated by the American Bird Conservancy for the whole United States, which has about twice as many turbines as Spain.
Bats are included in the Birdlife estimate, comments Mark Duchamp, president of Save the Eagles International (STEI). “Therefore, supposing for example that wind farms would kill twice as many bats as they do birds, the figures would be: 111 – 333 birds per turbine per year, and 222 – 666 bats per turbine/year. The mortality figures that were recorded in Germany and Sweden in the early nineties are not unusual after all”, he notes. Quoting from a California Energy Commission study: “In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al. (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.”
Duchamp has always maintained that earlier studies, made when bird mortality at windfarms wasn’t such a hot potato, were more credible than recent ones. “It is a curious business where those consultants who find or predict the lowest mortality land all the contracts.”

Read the full article at the Canada Free Press site

More on this topic is available in Spanish – with Google’s translator providing a large assist to understand the substance in English.

The study overview is provided on the SEO/Birdlife site, with the study downloadable there as a .pdf (Spanish).

There is a rebuttal, again understandable in English only using online translation, at REVE.  For Ontario the rebuttal is damming too, as the mitigation measures noted are more extensive than our government in denial considers.  The second last paragraph of the rebuttal states:

Faced with critical voices against the wind energy, Ferrer has urged them to go back and remember that the main problem as the possibilities of human life and biodiversity is global warming caused by human activity, the production of energy and mobility, so that “we have to respond efficiently to climate change and slow and slow its progress, because if not achieved, the youngest of the problems would be that wind turbines can kill birds,” he underlined .

Spain’s emissions intensity from electricity generation is approximately 300 g CO2/ kWh (pg 109 here), while Ontario’s, as per Canada’s inventory report for 2009, is almost a third of that at 110 g CO2/ kWh.