This type of system appears to be too dangerous to bird life. I can imagine a nightmare scenario where a large flock of geese or ducks happen to divert their normal travel path into one of these beams. Perhaps this technique should not be deployed unless this issue is resolved. One would hope that some effective means of scaring the birds away can be found if they are to make it feasible.
Now I have to wonder whether this problem has been documented but kept quiet. My faith in the 'authorities' to reveal the truth has been seriously degraded over the past few years. How many birds have their eye site damaged or are seriously injured by the intense beams that do not end up as streamers? Some will argue that burning coal also leads to bird death by some other means, but this is much more dramatic. Green energy is not always so green when placed under a microscope. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Terry Blanton <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Aug 19, 2014 12:37 pm Subject: [Vo]:Solar Collectors' Avian Threat http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/brightsource-solar-plant-sets-birds-on-fire-as-they-fly-overhead-1.2739512 Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the concentrated beams of solar energy focused upward by the plant's 300,000 mirrors — "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. Federal wildlife investigators who visited BrightSourceEnergy's Ivanpah plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer" every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger version. The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group. <more> "Streamers" establishes the graphic well.
