Thousands of Birds Meet a Fiery End at the World's Largest Solar Power Plant
Natasha Hakimi Zapata
Solar power also comes at a price, and in the case of California’s BrightSource Energy plant, the cost may be the lives of 28,000 wild creatures.
CBC News:
Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the concentrated beams of solar energy focused upward by the plant’s 300,000 mirrors — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.
Federal wildlife investigators who visited BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.
The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group.
—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata