Wind Turbines Are Not Killing Fields for Birds

President Trump continues his years' long dispute with wind turbines, claiming that wind turbines diminish home property values, cause cancer, and “kill all the birds.”

Wind turbines have not been found to diminish home values of nearby properties or cause cancer. According to numbers aggregated by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, cats are a bigger scourge to the overall bird community than wind turbines. The most recent estimate places the number of bird deaths at the paws of cats at 2.4 billion. Collisions from wind turbines on land killed a small fraction of birds in comparison to the damage that cats and glass buildings cause to the general bird population. Land wind turbines were responsible for over 200,000 bird deaths while collisions from building glass are estimated to be responsible for nearly 600 million bird deaths. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not provide estimates for deaths resulting from offshore wind turbines.

As the wind power industry grows and expands, the renewable’s relationship to its environment is coming under more intense scrutiny. While the relationship between wind turbines and different types of bird populations, particularly apex birds, is understudied, there is some evidence that turbines can hurt those populations. Hawaii, home to many endangered species, has taken extra steps to protect species that could be vulnerable to wind energy. The state requires all potential wind projects on both private and public land to have permits and conservation plans for the bird and bat population. Hawaii also documents animal mortality data from independent, third-party experts, with some wind farms subjected to steep fines for killing any federally protected birds.

As wind turbines become more common, reforms in this spirit could help alleviate some of the drawbacks of the new energy source.