Today the California Condor habitat in the mountainous region of Tehachapi and Tejon ranch has been destroyed for the condors. This is due to the thousands of lethal wind turbines constructed in their natural habitat. The wind industry has made a complete mockery of the condor recovery. Despite the success of condor breeding programs there are few if any free flying condors and it will stay that way as long as there are propeller style turbines.

Today the only way to keep the condors from flying off into the turbines is by the permanent feeding stations that have been set up for them. Without the feeding stations the condors would be hopping on the same wind currents used to spin the turbines searching the countryside looking for a meal. Their clumsy slow flights that would normally cover hundreds of square miles a day make them an easy target for the spinning wind turbine blades. Now the condors primarily just wander from perches close to the stations where the carcasses are dumped. If condors start to wander, they are trapped so they will not perish.

The new propeller style wind turbines reach 400- 500 ft into the sky and have a kill zone 30-45 times the area of the famous eagle killing turbines built at Altamont Pass. Now a wind farm of just 50 turbines is equivalent to 1500-2250 of theses early turbines. The blade tips on the new models with 12 ton blades rip through the air at over 220-240 mph when spinning at 20 just rotations per minute. This is twice as fast as the old turbines and over three times the speed of a major league baseball bat swing. The industry does not like to talk about these facts but this is the truth.

Despite industry propaganda, cats, windows, cars etc. kill almost no rare and endangered species such as Condors, Whooping Cranes, Red Kites, Tasmanian Wedge Tailed Eagles, and Egyptian Vultures. I could go on and on with this industry death list. The fact is, once these turbines are put into their foraging and nesting habitats they become the primary killers of these species. The reality is that no bird or bat is safe from these turbines. The public rarely hears about it because of bogus studies, wind farm security and carefully written contracts with gag orders. Think about it. Why would an honest industry ever need gag orders? Why would they rig Environmental Impact Documents? Why hide bodies?

Recent studies from Altamont Pass would have us believing that the new larger wind turbines are much safer than the early turbines used at Altamont pass. Much has been written about the benefits of repowering Altamont Pass with the new safer turbines. After reading the June 6 Wind Energy story published in the LA Times I began looking into the research behind the statement made by Dr. Shawn Smallwood ………”The neighboring Buena Vista Wind Energy Project recently replaced 179 aging wind turbines with 38 newer and more powerful 1-megawatt turbines. That repowering effort has reduced fatality rates by 79% for all raptor species and 50% for golden eagles, according to a study by Shawn Smallwood, an expert on raptor ecology in wind farms”.

I found a major flaw in the research and everyone I have shown this to agrees with me about this. The reason the studies are flawed is that all the search areas looking for blade strike victims are statistically inconsistent with the turbine sizes. I will illustrate the most extreme example of this inconsistency. The old 40KW turbines at Altamont have a stated historical search areas of a 50 meter radius yet the new and much larger 1 Mw turbines have a search area radius of only 75 meters. The comparison between these turbines reveals that the new 1 MW turbines have a 20.65 times greater rotor sweep(Kill Zone), yet their search areas were only increased by 2.2 times. By my calculations the search areas should have been many times larger. There is good reason bird mortality went down per KW of power production in these studies, the search areas are proportionally much smaller.

Being a Wildlife biologist with decades of observations, I know as well as anyone the integrity of the wind industry. I have read their rigged Environmental Impact Reports and I have yet to see an honest one. In my opinion there should many going to jail for this ongoing fraud. If corporations would lie about the impacts to Condors, Whopping Cranes and Eagles, they would lie about anything, including energy projections. As it now stands with wind energy, the taxpayers and wildlife are the big losers.

I will finish by saying that in order to keep all this in proper perspective one must keep in mind that state and federal renewable energy mandates that were written into law were created by this industry. The laws that absolve this industry from killing endangered
species were also created by them. These deliberate actions created a demand for their products and enabled the industry to circumvent Federal Wildlife Laws. It is time to rethink what has taken place and acknowledge the terrible impact this industry will have on the world. New non-lethal turbine designs have to be put into production. If not, then there will be the inevitable extinction of several bird species in the near future.