Will environmentalists find something wrong with alternative fuels, too?

Yep.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/11/wind.farm.ap/index.html

Yep.

/112/95/106611/1.html

Oh, go have some Peruvian blue flake.

Yep.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/13/iraq.rumsfeld/index.html

Or if you think it's unreasonable to tag an entire group with the opinion of one person:

Will morons still post their opinions here? Yep.

Am I still the best person in the world? Mmmm hmmm!

Yep.

The first poster seems to have the attitude of a man laughing at his fellow survivors on a lifeboat failing to bail the water fast enough. "Ha! See, I told you your "bailing" plan wouldn't work!"

Musuko.

The impact of the wind industry on the raptor population has been a well-known problem for years, so it's hardly news.

The reason activists raise big stinks about things is that corporations tend to have a very shallow or nonexistent sense of accountability and will half-ass anything that doesn't directly affect their bottom line (at the expense of ecology, community, and public health) unless consumers create the perception that it WILL affect their bottom line. *At some point, even for "green" companies, it's easy for things to just become about money since the people making their living at these activities are ultimately responsible to their investors.

Activists will never get all of their demands met, which is why they have to set the bar high and make bigger stinks for smaller issues. Unless you favor even more governmental control (like that would work anyway since they are in bed together) on corporations, or come up with a better solution or business model than disassociated suits making decisions to best benefit the investments of faceless stockholders, I guess you'll just have to live with annoying activists as a necessary evil.

Uh... I think shrouding a blade as long as a passenger jet wing in Charmin isn't going to make a significant difference when it's travelling at 100 km/h.

No kidding, what kind of a moron would think of doing that? Everyone knows Charmin sucks.

You build a nacelle that surrounds the blades (similar to on jet turbine engines) and put some high-strength mesh/netting that covers both openings.

Will any large group have enough people with different opinions that you can find some with viewpoints that you can poke fun at?

Yep

I would also like to note two important definitions:

Developer -- someone who wants to build a house in mountains
Enviornmentalist -- someone who already has a house in the mountains.

Wouldn't the structural purpose of that be more suited to protecting the blade, not keeping the bird from breaking its neck, spine, or wing?

haha

I think they need to put up wind farms in cities in order to cut down on the pigeon population. Winged rats they are.

My solution would be to use noisemakers to warn the birds. You know... Like those little zippy things that came in Happy Meals in the 80's that you blow in to make the metal, fan-like device in the middle make a loud noise.

They just need a few plastic owls.

I seem to recall that at least one wind generator design did address the issue of bird strikes, with a different gearing that results in lower turbine blade speed. Unfortunately, at the moment I can't recall any references, and my brain is slowly turning to mush from 5 hours of sleep in the past 2 days (insomnia sucks donkey balls ).

Most plastic owls I've seen are covered in bird crap.

These guys used sonic options

http://www.bird-x.com/links/repelbirds.html

"Wouldn't the structural purpose of that be more suited to protecting the blade, not keeping the bird from breaking its neck, spine, or wing?"

Birds fly into the spinning blades because they move so quickly and they have a hard time seeing them. Only stooopid birds would fly into an easily visible static framework.

Musuko.

"Utility transmission and distribution lines, the backbone of our electrical power system, are responsible for 130 to 174 million bird deaths a year in the U.S."

"Collisions with automobiles and trucks result in the deaths of between 60 and 80 million birds annually in the U.S."

"Some of the five million tall buildings in U.S. cities have been documented as being a chronic mortality problem for migrating birds. There are more than 100 million houses in the U.S., the best estimates put the toll due to collisions with these structures at between 100 million and 1 billion deaths annually."

"Agricultural pesticides are 'conservatively estimated' to directly kill 67 million birds per year."

"A Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) report states that, 'recent research suggests that rural free-ranging domestic cats in Wisconsin may be killing between 8 and 217 million birds each year. The most reasonable estimates indicate that 39 million birds are killed in the state each year.'"

"One television transmitter tower in Eau Claire, WI, was responsible for the deaths of over 1,000 birds on each of 24 consecutive nights. A 'record 30,000 birds were estimated killed on one night' at this same tower."


http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html

Sounds like wind farms are the least of the birds worries. I don't see the cell phone towers here either - and they account for lots of deaths too.