Researchers are gathering up government-funded grants to investigate how to ensure wind turbines and bats can coexist as the renewable energy source becomes more prevalent.
Wind is the top source of renewable electricity in the United States, and the Biden administration wants to deploy a lot more of it, including 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. But wind farms can come at a cost to wildlife that gets displaced by installations or collides with turbines as they spin, making mitigation a key balancing interest for the industry.
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For onshore wind, impacts on bird species are fairly well documented, as are those on bats. A review of research published in the fall of 2019 found that 22 of the 47 species of bats present in the continental U.S. have been recorded as fatalities at wind energy facilities, and an estimated 600,000 to 888,000 bats died from collisions with land-based wind turbines in 2012.
Less is known about how bats will interact with the relatively nascent offshore wind sector, said Christian Newman, a wildlife biologist and manager of the Endangered and Protected Species program at the Electric Power Resource Institute.
EPRI, an energy research and development nonprofit group, just received a $1.6 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to study what kind of environmental conditions are likely to attract bat activity in possible offshore wind areas in the Pacific Ocean.
“Bats fly at night. People don’t think about them a lot,” Newman told the Washington Examiner. But they’re critical to the ecosystem, especially for pest control, he mused.
For its West Coast project, EPRI’s team will use the funding to deploy acoustic bat detectors, designed to capture echolocated frequencies produced by the bats, on different structures up and down the coast to record activity. The detectors will be placed on land, boats, buoys, and, possibly, drones.
Newman, who will serve as lead researcher on the project, said the goal is to establish very “baseline information” to inform government and industry about wildlife activity. He stressed that whether bats are even going offshore still needs to be established but said researchers have reason to believe they are and that bats would be attracted to offshore wind installations, based on observations of land installations where increased bat activity and fatalities were observed after a given project was deployed but not before.
“As the offshore wind industry starts to get going, trying to get a better understanding of whether, where, and when bats might be going offshore” are the main questions that need answering, Newman said.
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Other recently awarded research projects will study wind and bats at facilities ranging from Maine to Texas.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory awarded funding to Bowman, a Vermont-based engineering services firm, in June to study how bats behave around wind turbines in Minnesota versus those in Texas.
EPRI received a portion of the NREL funding, too, to set up shop at a wind energy site in Iowa to investigate “whether bats prefer the calmer air directly behind wind turbines or the turbulent air surrounding them.”
