The Inquiry Into Nuclear Power Generation in Australia has heard about the consequences of wind farms for bats and birds.
Adrian Paterson is a South African scientist and engineer who led the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, and was CEO of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation from 2009-20.
Paterson spoke of his concerns around complete reliance on renewables, from their lack of consistent energy generation through to land clearing and the nature of the infrastructure, which tends to only last around two to three decades.
But when speaking about the impact on the nation’s ecology, Paterson labelled the push for renewables as “distressing.”
“I must say that with the wind turbines along the Southern European region, we now have demonstrated ecological information that the birds that fly from Africa to the north of Europe every year, those migrations that happen annually, they now do not fly across those countries,” he said.
“They fly around via Turkey. The wind turbines on the mountains in Europe have changed the migration patterns of birds between Europe and Africa.
“We are seeing similar destruction in the ridges of Queensland with the 138 kilometres of wind turbines that have been put up there.”
And while the death of birds is unsettling, Paterson said the threat to bats from wind turbines and the risk to insects with solar power generation were both extremely important.
Forty percent of Australia’s ecology is based on the existence of bats and it is the fast-moving nature of wind turbines that pose a hefty risk.
“The tip of a wind turbine blade is 20 percent below the speed of sound, they look like they’re going slowly but that tip speed is going as fast as an aircraft that you fly between different cities,” Paterson told the inquiry.
“And what happens to the bats is they send out their eco-location signal, they pick up that the blade is there, but of course the blade moves before they get to it and they get destroyed.”
Paterson said Queensland’s forests were highly dependent on bat defecation.
“What they put back into the soil from the things that they’ve eaten is so important,” he said.
“I find it distressing that people who call themselves environmentalists—who are not connected to ecology, the deep structure of the webs of biology that hold this country together—would rip through 138 kilometres of beautiful forests, dynamite the ridges, bring in these wind turbines and think that they are doing something from the planet.
An Increasing Threat
Earlier this year, the Ecological Society of Australia (ESA) published a report around the risks faced by bats by wind turbines.Analysis by the environmental group found that wind turbines pose a “serious and increasing” threat to bat populations both in Australia and globally.
It also found that measures such as slowing turbine speeds during periods of high bat activity could help prevent deaths, and that more research was needed urgently.
The ESA reported that many bats were slow to reproduce, meaning impacts on population were significant, that bats seemed attracted to turbines. However, information on its full impact on bats was limited by minimal research.
“Installed wind energy in Australia has grown, on average, 15.4 percent per annum over the past decade, and this is expected to continue,” the ESA wrote in its report.
“However, current fatality rates are sufficiently high to cause population declines of even common species, with increased risk for those frequently killed, such as the Australian Austronomus australis.”
The ESA said wind farms could co-exist with bat populations, but numerous measures would be needed to ensure this.
“Incorporating impacts into the planning stages of wind farm development and implementing curtailment in Australia will encourage critical research into bat-turbine interactions, assist in developing smart curtailment strategies, and prevent potentially irreversible population declines,” the group said.
