In what bird lovers are calling a landmark ruling, the Montpellier court held EDF Renouvelables and nine of its subsidiaries responsible for the deaths of 160 bats and birds, especially lesser kestrels, which regularly collide with the blades despite deterrents put in place by operators.
I have no clue what would work well, but I mean we figured it out right. I’m glad they are trying to save birds but turning them off all the time sounds so prehistoric.
Have you ever heard of a persistence of video display? It spins around a long led strip and all of a sudden an image appears because it spins round so fast your brain can’t process the fact that it is a spinning string. It looks like this:
I mean, if we can make that and we can make windmills, surely we could generate power while also preventing birds from accidently killing themselves.
Question is if they can even see that. Such things are usually optimized for our eyes. It’s faster than our eye can handle and we blur it together, but I wouldn’t be surprised if (some) birds can see fast motions better than we do, after all they naturally travel at far higher speeds than we do.
I dig your ideas and and stance on looking for a solution. I don’t think windmills go fast enough to achieve that effect, though just blinking LED strips might do the trick. I’m no bird lawyer per se, but I do believe their sight is different to ours.
You got my fantasy going, so now I’m imagining the windmills spouting some artificial clouds into the wind and lasers displaying birds of prey into the mist.
While I appreciate your cyberpunky laser neon fog enthusiasm, I’d really like to know how to actually fix this. After reading the Article, I think that simply painting a pattern with enough contrast and a way to enhance distance estimation would be good. Most of the ones I know are white with some small black elements at the tips, which is almost the worst I can imagine. I’d guess they simply can’t estimate the distance, even if they see that the things are there. They don’t have bad eyes, but the things are gigantic white planes with some light shading from the shape, but that probably just looks like a fuck off huge white-grey plane in terms of depth perception. Painting some marks on it to allow the parallax to make it obvious how big the distance between background and foreground is sounds like a super simple solution that might solve most of the problems. Then there’s also the possibility that they ram themselves into the blades deliberately, because humans made their whole habitat a nightmare…
I have no idea how birds see the world but laserwindmills sure sound cool, you could make something like that spraying dark spots in the sky like an octopus squirting ink. I mean if we can come up with these ideas then surely they can come up something that is less costly than turning them off all the time. Maybe just hire a bunch of artists and not only engineers, but I don’t know to be honest, maybe they’ve been trying really hard to figure something out all this time already.
Without any googling whatsoever I am pretty sure there have been studies on the matter. My guess is either there is no trivial solution or something that would go against efficiency.
There is definitely a big alternative wind energy movement about. I’ve seen designs on small scale that basically just wobble and generate power. Maybe we have to step back a bit, before we can go full in. We can’t have slowly rotating blades chop up our birdies.
Especially not the rare ones