Poster: Are you Repowering? Siting and Wildlife Considerations
26 Mar 19
4:30 PM
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5:30 PM
Wind technology has improved such that facilities are now being upgraded to produce more electricity through repowering. The repowering process may include retro-fitting existing infrastructure with new components such as blades or gearboxes to completely rebuilding sites. Risk factors such as the number of turbines, turbine spacing, total height, rotor-swept-area and rotation speed of turbines may change, and the consequences of these changes on wildlife impacts are unknown. For example, the USFWS Bayesian model assumes a direct relationship between total rotor-swept area and eagle risk. As such, fewer turbines with large rotor diameters can still equal the risk of greater numbers of smaller turbines. If the number of turbines stays the same, but the size of the turbines increases, modeled risk to eagles may be higher. It is conceivable that fewer large turbines could decrease risk to eagles since there are fewer turbines on the landscape to avoid. For general migratory birds it is unclear if larger rotors equates to greater risk. However, as turbines get increasingly large it is possible that we could see larger fatality events at certain locations under certain conditions. Like for birds, it is unclear if there is more or less risk to migratory bats Myotis or other bats. It is possible that larger turbines, assuming that the lowest portion of the rotor swept area is higher above ground, might have less risk to Myotis as their foraging heights are generally much lower.