Each week, we talk with our colleagues at The Colorado Sun about the stories they're following. This time, Health And Environment Reporter Michael Booth joined us to discuss a story about preventing injuries and deaths to bats who fly too close to wind power turbines.
The National Renewable Energy Lab is part of a national set of U.S. researchers whose studies that the Department of Energy is funding all across the country. The studies aim to investigate the impact on bats, what's attracting them to the wind turbines, and how the turbines might be changed to address the problem.
Colorado is receiving $1 million for the research. The total price tag for this round of wildlife studies across the U.S. is $27 million. $7.5 million has been earmarked for bat research in particular.
Booth tells KUNC environmental officials in other parts of the country have seen die-offs of thousands of bats at a time around wind turbines.
“California has done studies showing in one season as many as 600,000 bats were killed by the spinning blades of the wind turbines,” he said. “Researchers are trying to figure out how serious this is, how much of the bat population we're talking about.”
Authorities have determined die-offs of birds related to wind turbines do not rise to what they call a “population-level problem,” meaning that there aren't enough deaths to significantly alter the future population of a species.
“But with bats, they are concerned that it's enough to make a difference in the overall health of bat populations.” Booth said. “Bats are really important. They eat hundreds of insects each an hour, often mosquitoes. We have a West Nile problem. It's great for the bats to get rid of that before they bite humans and pets.”
Bats are also pollinators, like bees and hummingbirds.
“People look at the wind turbines and they think, well, they're just these beautiful, majestic, slow moving things off in the distance,” Booth told KUNC. “But those blades are so enormous and their circumference is so huge that out at the tips of those blades, they're traveling between 100 and 200 miles an hour on a windy day.”
