CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

In response to growing accusations from both conservationists and conservatives that renewable energy sources like solar and wind kill likewise many birds, U.S. News and Earth Written report has compiled information on which energy industries are responsible for the most bird deaths every year.

For each ability source — wind, solar, oil and gas, nuclear, and coal — the information on bird deaths is gathered from different advocacy and industry groups, bookish institutions, and government sources. Because estimates vary then widely on solar, wind, and oil, U.S. News included both depression-range and loftier-range estimates for how many birds are killed by those electricity sources.

Either way, the results bear witness that even with high-range estimates for renewables compared to low-range estimates for fossil fuels, fossil fuels are responsible for far more bird fatalities than solar or wind. Annotation the nautical chart below:

A U.S. News and World Report chart shows estimates of how many birds are killed each year by different fuel sources. CREDIT: U.S. News & World Report
A U.S. News and Earth Report chart shows estimates of how many birds are killed each year past different fuel sources. CREDIT: U.S. News & Earth Report

The results should exist taken with a grain of table salt. Every bit U.S. News noted, each study used a different methodology to come up with their numbers. "In that location's no standardized fashion of doing it that everyone can concord to," Garry George, the renewable energy director for Audubon California, told the magazine.

In improver, some of the inquiry used is outdated, and does not accept into account that renewable power stands to increase in the United States. For case, the study used to estimate bird deaths from United States wind ability was from 2009, and wind ability has increased substantially in the The states since then. According to the American Wind Energy Association, full installed current of air chapters in the U.S. was approximately 35,000 megawatts — a number that has increased to about 61,000 for 2014. Those numbers stand up to increase also, as more than 12,000 megawatts of wind chapters were currently under construction at the end of 2013, co-ordinate to AWEA.

The inquiry as well varies past source. Both the low and loftier estimates of wind ability bird deaths came from a peer-reviewed written report in the periodical Biological Conservation, and was essentially a round-upwards of all available information peer-reviewed studies on the matter done by other scientists. For oil and gas, both the low and loftier estimates came from a Agency of Land Management memo from 2012.

The depression estimate for bird deaths from solar ability comes from the solar company BrightSource, which was recently defendant by the Center for Biological Variety of operating a solar farm that kills as many equally 28,000 birds a yr. The high estimate comes from the Eye for Biological Diversity, whose estimate is simply from that one solar farm in California. Bird deaths from solar farms have been estimated to be relatively low, though — a U.S. Fish and Wild animals study before this yr found only 233 bird deaths at 3 different solar farms in California over the grade of two years.

As for coal, those bird death numbers came from a peer-reviewed study in the journal Renewable Free energy. That judge had a more sweeping methodology, though, with the report'south author including everything from coal mining to production — and bird deaths from climatic change that coal emissions produce. Together, that amounted to about 5 birds per gigawatt-hour of energy produced past coal, almost 8 million per year.

Either way, U.S. News notes that none of these numbers concord a candle to cats, which are estimated to impale 1.four to 3.7 billion birds every year.