Acronym Alert: AWWI, The American Wind Wildlife Institute
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY 
on 11.19.08
photo: Brent Danley
While few people would doubt that wind power shows great promise, where new wind farms get built is often a contentious issue, with one of the issues being (of course) impact on wildlife and the environment. That's where the newly formed American Wind Wildlife Institute comes in. The group of 20 wind power and environmental organizations will collaborate on research, mapping, mitigation and public education on best practices in balancing habitat protection and wind farm siting.
AWWI counts as its members the following organizations:
13 Wind Power Businesses, 7 Environmental Groups
AES Wind Generation, Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies, Babcock & Brown, BP Alternative, Clipper Windpower, Inc., E.ON, Environmental Defense Fund, enXco, GE Energy, Horizon Wind Energy, Iberdrola Renewables, National Audubon Society, Natural Resource Defense Council, Nordic Windpower, NRG Systems, Inc., RES Americas, Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, The Wildlife Society, Union of Concerned Scientists, Vestas Americas, and World Wildlife Fund
No exact word on what exactly the group will be spending it’s initial two year budget on $3 million, beyond the notion of the aforementioned research and public education and “proactively addressing potential biodiversity impacts as wind energy is more widely deployed.” But considering some of the persistent, if not entirely accurate, beliefs regarding wind turbines (that they are a large source of bird deaths being one), nipping some of these public perception problems (as well as vocally acknowledging the environmental impact of wind farms) in the bud seems wise.
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This is certainly a pressing issue of the day, and it is encouraging that energy companies are working with conservation and environmental groups in an attempt to determine the best way to site wind farms.
I feel obligated to point out, however, that wind energy companies and lobbies are prone to using a red herring argument as their primary means of addressing their impacts to wildlife, particularly bats and birds --> their argument is that cats kill more birds than wind. They sometimes throw in cars and other collisions as well. The assertion that cats kill more birds than wind towers do, is not relevant to the argument that wind towers impact bird populations. Cats have a substantial impact on bird populations (which absolutely needs to be addressed and publicized - as it's own issue). Wind power can have a substantial impact on bird and bat populations. The two arguments are separate. It disturbs me that so many pro-wind arguments start with this logical fallacy, as it makes me feel that they are hiding something, trying to distract me from the issue at hand.
I applaud the members of the American Wind Wildlife Institute for coming to the table together to acknowledge and address the issue of wind power impacts on wildlife. I hope that they can come up with feasible and biologically meaningful ways to establish wind research areas/wind farms.
@ Nellie: I do not see why this would be a red herring. Up until now nobody ever cared about impacts on birds. Not when new road were built, not when communication towers were built, not when skyscrapers with mirror windows were built. Suddenly when wind turbines were built, which kill an amount of birds that is negligible to the amount killed by other human activities, some people (very often the same people who do not care about wildlife on any other occasion) start to complain about impacts on birds. The whole bird argument is a red herring on its own to hide more prosaic reasons to oppose wind energy development (a threat to vested interest, don't like the view of them, etc.).
If people are really concerned they should start with the biggest threats first. Wind energy does not belong to these biggest threats.
Some more nuance:
As I pointed out in my previous post the bird issue is often used in an opportunistic way.
But in many cases the people who are honestly concerned about wildlife look upon the issue in an intuitive way: windturbines are high and they move, so they must make enormous amount of victims among birds. A comparison with other man-made bird mortality sets things in perspective. This intuitive approach also ignores the adverse affects of the alternatives for wind energy: climate change and pollution from coal power plants have an enormous on bird- population, albeit less directly visible.
Before using the bird argument as a generic argument against all wind energy development one should thus also look into these other threats.
This does not mean that windparks can be built everywhere, as some bird-species are more sensitive to the presence of windparks and /or are more rare as others. But the bird-argument can and should not be used as an overall argument against windenergy.