- "In one study, respondents were asked how much they were willing to pay to prevent migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds by covering the oil ponds with protective nets. Subjects were told that either 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 migrating birds were affected annually, for which subjects reported they were willing to pay $80, $78 and $88 respectively.[2] Other studies of willingness-to-pay to prevent harm have found a logarithmic relationship or no relationship to scope size.[3]"
Divide by the 111 million buildings in the US of which 90% are single family homes.
So it’s what ~1,000x as bad as the average structure but we’re talking about something several times the size of the average single family home. Plop down a housing development on those same 3,500 acres and it’s likely to kill far more birds.
I’ve personally witnessed many birds die flying into windows in a detached single family homes. Multiply that by ~3000 homes and 6k per year would be a massive underestimate IMO.
It’s uncommon with small windows, but a glass sliding door or big picture window regularly gets a thump. Some get back up, but many don’t.
I do live in an area with a lot of birds so that may be a major factor.
Yet this doesn't account for the type of birds they are killing. I view milling a swallow different from killing some kind of large raptor or large bird. Those arent your window hitters. In fairness windmills also kill a lot of large birds. No tech is perfect.
Context is always important. Part of why this gets attention is that the plant is killing protected species, including many that don't fall victim to cats.
More than that, the solar plant itself is an entirely unnecessary addition. Photovoltaic cells were already viable in 2014. Other net-zero CO2 power options are also available, though wind turbines frequently suffer the same problem.
This plant exists to feel good about the energy it produces, and being able to sit around and watch it immolate protected species every day cuts against that goal.
> More than that, the solar plant itself is an entirely unnecessary addition.
The interesting thing about Ivanpah is that it's both generation and storage. It's probably a technological dead end, but that is not an absolutely sure thing now and it certainly wasn't obvious a decade ago. Batteries have come a long way in that time.
> What was once the world’s largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening... “The Ivanpah plant was a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster,” Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club said in an email. “Along with killing thousands of birds and tortoises, the project’s construction destroyed irreplaceable pristine desert habitat along with numerous rare plant species,” Dowell said. “While the Sierra Club strongly supports innovative clean energy solutions.. Ivanpah demonstrated that not all renewable technologies are created equal.”
While it's true that my napkin-math uses it's planned max output, this correction is not accurate either: That figure seems to refer to only a portion of the generators running on the site, and it also involves contracts rather than what was delivered.
Instead let's look at Wikipedia's the "Production" > "Ivanpah total" for the year 2022, which is 769,164 MWh across that year. Convert to joules, divide by the seconds in a year, and that's an average output of 87.74 megawatts.
That's down by a factor of ~4.47x from my original napkin-math, so we can just apply it to the coal-amount, giving us a revised "Is mining and burning ~21.9 tons of coal gonna kill a bird?"
You might want to try reading the whole post and further editing. And you should consider avoiding all the weird scaling and working in units of energy. For example:
> ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird.
This is incoherent.
BTW, Wikipedia says the annual net output is 856 GWh, so it’s 143 MWh per bird killed. You’ve forgotten about capacity factor.
You misunderstand, the two hypothetical power plants have an equivalent instantaneous power output in watts. It does not matter how long you choose to sit around staring at them, they're doing their steady-state thing in the background, forever. It doesn't matter to them whether the next calculation involves a halfday or a fortnight.
The "year" aspect comes into play for taking "solar-fried birds per year" (given to us) and "coal burned per year" (calculated from wattage) and then canceling out the year, leaving us with "solar-fried birds per coal".
> you should consider avoiding all the weird scaling and working in units of energy [...] the annual net output is 856 GWh
You're the one doing weird stuff here: Even as you say to use units of energy, you are actually using a unit of power, since "annually" means per-year! Choosing to use cursed units (1 watt-hours vs 3600 joules) just makes it even harder to realize what's going on because the word "hour" is hanging out there as a red-herring.
> capacity factor
Fair enough, I inserted Wikipedia's value for planned/rated level of operation, rather than the much-reduced level it was actually operating under for various reasons.
> It does not matter how long you choose to sit around staring at them, they're doing their steady-state thing in the background, forever.
This is simply not true. Very few power plants work like that, and Ivanpah is definitely an exception. (This is why the capacity factor isn’t 100%.)
> > capacity factor
> Fair enough, I inserted Wikipedia's value for planned/rated level of operation, rather than the much-reduced level it was actually operating under for various reasons.
No, and you might consider reading the article on capacity factor (and don’t stop at the first paragraph - read the section on renewables). If you put 1kW of solar panels on your roof, you are not getting 1kW times 1 year of energy every year — not even close.
And you are replying to my objection to:
> ~65 kilowatts provided per dead bird.
If Ivanpah could kill a bird, once, to produce 65 kW forever, that would be an unbelievably good tradeoff. But, of course, that’s not what Ivanpah does, and saying that years somehow enter the mix later on doesn’t make this statement any more coherent.
And most "napkin math" refers to a simplified calculation with rough guesses made in an impromptu or amateur fashion, like using a pen to write with no options nearby except a disposable paper napkin.
> > canceling out the year
> If Ivanpah could kill a bird, once, to produce 65 kW forever
The context is to get ratios between (A) scope/benefit as indicated by wattage and (B) birds-deaths, and (C) coal-used. If you double the activity of each plant, you can expect one to double the fried-birds, and the other to double the coal-needed.
It feels like I'm comparing dollars-costs of running electric versus gasoline engines of the same "horsepower", and you're unsatisfied because "a gallon of gasoline can't burn forever."
> And most "napkin math" refers to a simplified calculation with rough guesses
Assuming that it's always high noon when you're talking about solar power plants is more than a little rough for napkin math.
> The context is to get ratios between (A) scope/benefit as indicated by wattage and (B) birds-deaths
I give up. The wattage of a power plant is its benefit per unit time, and bird deaths are a detriment not per unit time.
and (B) birds-deaths, and (C) coal-used. If you double the activity of each plant, you can expect one to double the fried-birds, and the other to double the coal-needed.
> You misunderstand, the two hypothetical power plants have an equivalent instantaneous power output in watts.
Yes, but they have different capacity factors. That is, the solar plant is not producing power at night, but your calculation gives it credit for it.
It's best to just keep sane units; e.g. say this plant generates 3 petajoules each year, and kills 6000 birds/year, so it kills one bird per 500 gigajoules.
A coal plant is about 33% efficient, and coal has about 30MJ/kg of specific energy; so we get about 10MJ of electrical energy/kg. So each 50,000 kg of coal mined and burnt would produce the same amount of energy that Ivanpah does between killing birds.
It's mind-boggling how consistently almost everyone is confused about energy and power units and makes meaningless calculations and claims. People make this kind of mistake pretty much every time there's an energy story. Journalists too. It is confusing but a little red flag appears in my head whenever I try to do this kind of math.
It would be nice if we used energy as the main unit and energy/time for power like in SI. Rates seem to be more intuitive than integrals.
IMO the number one biggest contributor to this problem is "watt hours", it a cursed unit, a name which sows confusion. Even if it were named nonsense like "floops", the world would become a better clearer place.
It automatically sounds as if it involves watts, hours, or even watts per hour, but it's actually none of those things. It's just (joules * 3600), where that fixed multiplier comes from a quirk of history in how we subdivided our clocks.
My advice? Whenever you see it, replace it with "jumbojoules", as in "I used 87 kilo-jumbojoules running that appliance this month."
It is like all those different knives you get at fancy dinners. Small scoop for ice cream, big scoop for running an efficient industrial society. I'm not clear on what the medium scoop does.
That article from 2016 is not about the CSP project in Nevada (Crescent Dunes) but the one across the border in California (Ivanpah) that had the bird kills because it had no thermal energy storage and thus had to keep heliostats focused near the solar receiver, creating a hot spot nearby.
Crescent Dunes invented the algorithm for focus that prevents birdkills. And it had thermal energy storage, the first tower CSP at utility scale to do so, which removes the need to keep the heliostats always on standby focused together on one spot. Ivanpah was the last CSP built with no storage, and since then no bird kills. All 30 projects in China have been required to include storage.
Crescent Dunes (100 MW) had other problems as the first ever Tower CSP with storage at utility scale (Gemasolar had been built with storage a few years earlier in Spain, at 50 MW. Crescent Dunes had a major outage because a tank leaked, bankrupting the startup that developed it, but now its owned by a big Spanish outfit and has been back online for several years, supplying night solar to Las Vegas:
https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes...
So the birdkill is actually from a separate focal spot near the absorber where standby heliostats are focused? Interesting, I did not know that! Makes me wonder why standby heliostats would need to be focused at all? Couldn't their aimpoints be randomized over a much larger volume near the receiver, while still being standby and able to quickly move back onto the receiver when needed?
By the way, I’m happy to find someone with CSP knowledge on HN. Are you working in the field?
Not a very timely article, since that facility seems about to be shut down. It uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight to drive a turbine (& cook birds), but isn't as efficient as modern photovoltaic solar, and the electric companies with contracts with them are trying to get out of them.
It would be interesting to see video of the birds getting incinerated in mid flight.
I presume there is video of the aftermath ("workers have nicknamed the smouldering birds "streamers", because they leave tiny wisps of white smoke behind as they burn up in the sky.") of the incinerated birds here: https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-de...
I found myself accidentally behind the secured area of this solar installation while driving in the Mojave National Preserve. It is truly bizarre to see up close - the glow that you see around the towers in the photo on the article is quite bright in person.
I wondered when I saw it - is that glow the air turning into plasma? Are otherwise-invisible dust particles reflecting the absurd amount of light hitting them? Is the heat enough for the air to start scattering light?
It's no surprise that it would incinerate birds, in any case.
I've heard of this being a problem at other solar plants, this one existing in the path of a pacific migratory path. However these migration paths exist all over the US and are fairly wide, therefore it would be difficult to build a plant that isn't somewhere near or in a migration path.
It seems to be a design issue that impacts most of these solar thermal plants without much of a solution.
> To make matters worse, some of the deterrent systems in place to keep other animals out of the facility have caused unforeseen repercussions. The plant installed a large fence to keep out endangered desert tortoises, but the knock-on effect is that this has made it way easier for coyotes to kill roadrunners.
> The good news for the roadrunners is that the Ivanpah team says it plans on adding 'roadrunner doors' to the fences so they can easily hop through, instead of getting trapped.
Trying not to laugh. They should just paint the door on...
> Birds in the sky, on the other hand, are a little more complicated, because how do you stop a bird from flying wherever it wants?
They better pray no eagle wanted to take a break over there in these 10+ years or they might be criminal in US law :)
> The plant installed a large fence to keep out endangered desert tortoises, but the knock-on effect is that this has made it way easier for coyotes to kill roadrunners.
Sure it does. Or it should, anyway. Unfortunately the internet has spawned a couple generations of individuals that will gleefully take any form of bait that's laid in front of them and now here we are.
Demonstrably untrue. "We" make performative mutterings online while taking literally no concrete action at a personal or professional level to advance solutions to any of the myriad things we claim to care about. Conclusion: what people actually care about is online optics.
We are allowed to talk about concepts, topics and news worthy articles and not take any action to change it. Conversation around topics isn't limited only to those that advance solutions to such things. I never claimed to care enough about the article to take any personal or professional level of interest to change the outcome.
I am simply here for discussion on the article, not to change those outcomes and I am sure neither are you.
Nah. It's big enough for individuals to perform the online ritual of Good Think, but I'm not seeing any progress or even credible solutions being worked towards. Wake me when the processed food and agricultural conglomerate megacorps have all gone bankrupt from concerted, successful, consumer advocacy and I'll start taking these claims seriously. Y'all can't even be assed to stop feeding Amazon's bottom line long enough for consumer retail to stabilize so miss me with claims of serious conservation efforts. Odds are you haven't even met a single individual in your lifetime who'd willingly make the kind of lifestyle changes that that would actually require.
But in context, crashing into glass buildings kills about 600 million birds a year.
Cats? About 2.4 BILLION bird kills a year.
https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds