Resources Industrial Wind Impacts | Environment, Habitat Loss, Ecology

Habitat Loss

November 2011, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center(FRESC) , Wind Energy and Wildlife Research at the Forest and
Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, Fact Sheet 2011–3134 

Impacts of Wind Farms on Upland Habitats
The Environmental Cost of Scotland’s Renewable Energy (pdf), The John Muir Trust
Revolution

April 1, 2014 Impacts of Industrial Wind Development On Wildlife and Ridgeline Habitat, Vermont and New Hampshire Mountains, PeakKeepers

September 2007, Impacts of Wind Energy Facilities on Wildlife and Wildlife Habitat Technical Review . Technical Review Committee on Wind Energy Facilities and Wildlife, The Wildlife Society,

Land Use

4 October 2018, Observation-based solar and wind power capacity factors and power densities. Lee M Miller, David W Keith. Environmental Research Letters.  http://iopscience.iop.org  (PDF ARTICLE)
Wind plants with the largest areas have the lowest power densities. Wind power capacity factors are increasing, but that increase is associated with a decrease in capacity densities, so power densities are stable or declining. If wind power expands away from the best locations and the areas of wind power plants keep increasing, it seems likely that wind’s power density will decrease as total wind generation increases.

October 04, 2018, Climatic Impacts of Wind Power.  Lee M Miller, David W Keith. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.09.009

Environmental

An Ecological Risk Assessment of Wind Energy Development in Montana.
Brian Martin, Amy Pearson, Brad Bauer. The Nature Conservancy
Helena, Montana January 2009

Lake Superior Action Research Conservation, larc.ca  Defining Green
This is a wonderful article on what green means, and on the specific threats to the Lake Superior watershed and boreal forests. This is specific to the Bow Lake Wind Project which is located directly across the big lake from the Huron Mountains, making the observations and issues identical to those that would be seen in here.

STRAIGHT TALK Industrial Wind is Not as Green as We Were Told  WeCAREsd.org

MARCH 2016, GULLEN RANGE WIND FARM, Annual Environmental Management Report

Letter of Concern Regarding Industrial Wind Development in the Algoma District

July 19, 2018, Letter On behalf of Trout Unlimited, on the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) transmission line.
” Consistent with our mission, TU’s primary concern will be the impacts of the project on habitat for cold water fish  … A large amount of currently forested habitat will be cleared for construction, and much of this will be permanently converted to cleared corridors. Clearing and construction of access roads and tower foundations may cause sedimentation and other impacts on water quality. Maintained corridors in riparian areas will remove trees that provide shade and will likely raise stream temperatures. ” 

Wind power and ecology, October-November 2011 Nature and Society

Ridgeline Wind in Vermont: What you need to know. Impacts of Building Utility Scale Wind” in Vermont. Energize Vermont (Brochure)

Upper Great Plains Wind Energy Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)
Documents related to the Upper Great Plains Wind Energy Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS). U.S. Department of Energy, Western Area Power Administration, U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

2010, Potential climatic impacts and reliability of very large-scale wind farms, Wang, C. and Prinn, R. G., Atmos. Chem. Phys., 10, 2053-2061, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-10-2053-2010,.

Peter R. Law, Mark Fuller. Evaluating anthropogenic landscape alterations as wildlife hazards, with wind farms as an example, Ecological Indicators, Volume 94, Part 1,
2018, Pages 380-385, ISSN 1470-160X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2018.06.061.
https://wild.nrel.gov/content/evaluating-anthropogenic-landscape-alterations-wildlife-hazards-wind-farms-example?print

Peter R. Law, A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Wind Farms And Wildlife Hazards. sciencetrends.com  DECEMBER 13, 2018

21 October 2011, The effect of a giant wind farm on precipitation in a regional climate model. B H Fiedler, M S Bukovsky. IOP Publishing Ltd. (PDF Article)
The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is employed as a nested regional climate model to study the effect of a giant wind farm on warm-season precipitation in the eastern two-thirds of the USA. The boundary conditions for WRF are supplied by 62 years of NCEP/NCAR (National Center for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research) global reanalysis. In the model, the presence of a mid-west wind farm, either giant or small, can have an enormous impact on the weather and the amount of precipitation for one season, which is consistent with the known sensitivity of long-term weather forecasts to initial conditions. The effect on climate is less strong. In the average precipitation of 62 warm seasons, there is a statistically significant 1.0% enhancement of precipitation in a multi-state area surrounding and to the south-east of the wind farm. (B H Fiedler and M S Bukovsky 2011 Environ. Res. Lett. 6 045101)

 

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