Wind turbines are death machines

DO YOU have a garden? If so, is it frequented by wild birds? Do you ever find dead birds in your garden?

Remember all creatures die eventually – by many means – conflict attacks; being prey to a predator; illness and disease; famine and/or just old age after a “happy life”.

It is reckoned that most wild UK birds have a high mortality rate. I myself have nearly an acre of land with hedges and trees and open grass and two bird tables. My garden is fairly unkempt and has a great diversity of wild birdlife visiting it, but I rarely ever find dead birds.

Why? Because once they die a predator eats them quickly at dawn or dusk or under night cover, eg a fox or a feral cat or a larger carrioneating bird like a magpie or crow. So despite having a large suitable piece of ground, I myself very rarely ever find a dead bird.

Bear this in mind.

Let’s go on to the Mynydd y Gwair wind turbines near my home. My wife and I have been doing a survey of the velocity/speed of the blade tips. By planning approval conditions, the wind turbines here are 127m high to the top of an upright blade, and the “nacelle” at the top of the tower is 80m high – so 127m minus 80m gives the blade length as 47m. Each turbine here has three blades. We have been surveying their average revolutions using a few different turbines by fixing an eye on one blade at a time for a minute at a time.

The average revolutions are nine per minute. So the tip of one blade travels the circumference nine times a minute and 60 times that in an hour. This works out at about 160km/h or just about 100mph for the blade tips.

Remember there are three blades, so in just one minute there are three blade tips travelling around at 100mph and with 16 giant wind turbines that makes 48 blade tips at 100mph at any height varying from 33m above the ground up to 127m above ground all on just one mountain, our Mynydd y Gwair. They must be killing lots of birds.

Birds are not designed to look out for such death machines; they cannot even see a peregrine falcon coming at that speed until it hits them.

Worse still, the blades are proven to kill bats, not by impact but simply by pressure waves in the air turbulence caused by these blades. This is all for an average energy output of just 8MW for a 70,00MW grid.

These wind turbines are truly death machines for birds and bats.

Ioan Richard Craigcefnparc, Swansea