A New Study Shows Seabirds Avoid Offshore Turbines

Matt_Bennett (Slashdot reader #79,107) writes:Swedish power company Vattenfall released a study on the interactions of seabirds and offshore wind turbines. They used cameras and radar to record the tracks of the birds during daylight hours at Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm over peak periods of bird activity in 2020 and 2021. The study observed no collisions or even narrow escapes between birds and rotor blades. In 97.7% of the recordings, the birds avoided the RSZ (rotor swept zone). The company (owned by the Swedish government) spent 3 million on the two-year study, according to Electrek, and now has ten thousand videos of birds flying...nowhere near the wind turbines. Herring gulls avoided the rotor blades by a full 90-110 meters (295-361 feet) while kittiwakes flew even further from the blades - 140-160 meters (459-525 feet). "By way of comparison, each of these human-related sources kill millions or even billions of birds per year: fossil fuels, deforestation, pesticides, windows, and the common housecat."

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