Chronicle columnist Richard Stride’s recent commentary talks about the environmental damage of a single catastrophic event that happened several years ago. This magnitude of damage doesn’t happen every year.
He mentions the impact on animals, including 82,000 birds killed or injured. In studies of wind turbine losses recapped by American Bird Conservancy with stats from 2013, between 234,000 and 573,093 bird fatalities per year were estimated at that time.
There are no more recent studies, and I wonder why, but we know wind turbine construction has dramatically increased since 2013. Currently, there are approximately 70,800 turbines in the U.S. with estimates of 10% to 17% more to be added each year.
Where is the concern for the likely millions of birds to be killed annually from this green technology?
Tom Duffy
Centralia
