🔬 Science 15h ago · Brendan Brown

Six North American wind farms let their blades sit idle until the wind passed 5 meters per second and bat deaths fell by 62 percent, because bats only hunt when the air is nearly calm — the hours a turbine earns the least are exactly the hours it kills the most

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Here is a fact about wind turbines that sounds like an accounting footnote and turns out to be a conservation strategy: a modern turbine starts generating at a wind speed of about 3.5 meters per second, a gentle breeze of 8 miles per hour. Below that, the blades still turn, freewheeling in the light air, producing almost nothing. Those idle-spinning hours contribute a rounding error to the year’s electricity.



They contribute something else in bulk: dead bats. Hundreds of thousands of th

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