| ▲ | hadlock a day ago | |
There's actually some truth to the bird thing. Some of the first wind turbines in the 1980s had very short blades, 5-10 feet, and would spin at ~50rpm, sort of like a spinning baseball bat, ready to strike birds out of the air. Combined with not being very high off the ground, maybe 40 feet, birds would take off from the ground directly into the very fast spinning blades. Modern wind turbines neither look nor act like these early turbines, but that's where the data comes from. They only just retired those fast spinning, low to the ground turbines in like ~2017. Something like 80-95% of all bird strikes came from ~35 essentially prototype wind turbines, and virtually none come from modern, huge slow spinning turbines. | ||