198 16.11 PR: Locate Information from Sources
Here is just a tiny sample of the information contributors you could tap and the information they might provide to help you focus your messages.
Public-sector Institutions
The Department of the Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wind Energy Guidelines provide detailed specifications for the way wind energy facilities must operate, including ways to reduce bird and other animal mortality. You might suggest posting a link to these guidelines on the AWEA’s website and include some narrative about the ways your members are complying with the regulations. You might also include this document and some of the data about compliance to your association members as part of their “talking points” material. This document could also be shared as part of a news conference or in any statement your ED might issue to the media.
Private-sector Institutions
The National Academy of Sciences, a widely-respected, private-sector, non-profit organization, conducted a study about other causes of bird mortality in addition to those caused by the wind power industry. It appears from this study that bird mortality from other causes is much greater than bird deaths from wind power facilities. You might, once again, consider posting a link to this study on the AWEA’s website, compose some narrative that summarizes the findings of the study and make sure any public statements or “talking points” include the results. At the same time, you need to be sure that you don’t minimize the concern for bird mortality rates caused by wind power.
The National Wind Coordinating Collaborative is a private-sector, non-profit organization with partners from the wind industry, science and environmental organizations, and wildlife management agencies. They did a study of wind-wildlife interactions that summarized a huge amount of scientific and scholarly data and produced a fact sheet that outlines how the wind power industry and environmentalists are responding to the issue. This document would clearly be part of your information package.
Scholarly Sources
Conducting a search in Google Scholar using the search statement “bird mortality from wind energy” uncovers hundreds of scholarly studies done in the U.S. and around the world. The general consensus appears to say that there is a clear link between wind turbines and bird mortality, but there are lots of caveats in the findings.
One article in the scholarly journal Biological Conservation shows that bird mortality is greater with a type of wind turbine that is being phased out (lattice vs. monopole); that taller monopole turbines may pose more risk of raptor bird mortality than shorter monopole turbines because raptors fly at a higher elevation than song birds (the usual victims of wind turbines), but that the blades on taller monopole turbines turn at a slower rate than the blades on shorter turbines so those risks may offset one another. Again, the data from studies such as this one would n