CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study is hoping to improve clean energy for wildlife.
New research from Oregon State University suggests the solution to birds flying into wind turbines, might be simpler than we think.
According to an MIT report, anywhere between 140,000 and 679,000 birds are killed by wind turbine blades in the U.S. each year.
However, the report notes those numbers only represent a fraction of birds killed annually in other ways.
But now OSU is working on solving the problem.
Turns out, it could be just a matter of painting the turbines.
“So, you think about your bicycle wheel, right? You look at your bicycle wheel and you can see all the spokes. You start spinning that wheel really, really fast and spokes kind of vanish. And you can see it’s almost like you can see through that wheel,” OSU Senior Researcher, Christian Hagen explains, “same principle with the wind turbines where, and a lot of people don’t realize this, but those blades are moving, the top speeds can be over 200 miles per hour. So, while it looks slow to us from afar, as you get up close, those things are really whipping around. And so the concept is, that a black blade – a single black blade interrupts that smear because it’s probably not from a physics standpoint or biological standpoint totally accurate to say this but it kind of creates a flicker effect where it interrupts that pattern.”
So, it seems by painting one of the blades black, instead of all of them being white, could keep birds from flying into the turbines.
OSU’s study is a collaboration between Pacificorp, the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and the U.S. Department of Energy among others.
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