I know what your thinking! OMG all those poor song birds flying into wind turbines and being turned into nose diving corpes. Oh the horror.
Well T Snitz Esq. here to put this into wonderful prospective (PS. people who watch birds for a hobby are psychologically unstable). The US Forest Service Estimates that between 500 million and one billion birds are killed each year due to collisions with buildings, power lines, windows, blah blah blah.
As for wind turbines, the number lies between 250,000 and 600,000 death acorrding to the US Bird Conservancy. Of course those wind turbines product additional power lines that may take down another 1 million birds.
So the short answer is that wind turbines kill an additional small fraction of 1% more birds. Who cares! Besides it's abundantly clear that those "things" behind killed are not actually birds at all.
Blowin’ in the wind
2023 was a huge year for wind energy. Indeed, 117 gigawatts of new capacity was installed around the world, up 50% on the previous year’s figure and reversing two years of stalling progress, per a new report from the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).
While that’s an all-time high for global wind production and a promising step in the shift towards cleaner energy, the GWEC did warn that the goal to triple installed renewable energy generation by 2030 — which was agreed by more than 100 governments at COP28 last year — would require growth within the industry to “rapidly accelerate”. New capacity would need to reach 320 GW a year by the end of the decade to track towards the goal.
Cleaning up
The world’s been increasingly turning to turbines as a source of renewable energy, with wind now accounting for more than 10% of utility-scale electricity generation in the US. That shift is expected to continue too: according to the International Energy Agency, wind and solar will account for 95% of all renewable growth until 2028.
Global capacity from new onshore wind energy installations alone climbed to over 100 gigawatts for the first time ever last year. According to estimates from the Department of the Interior, that magnitude of new capacity would theoretically be enough to power 22.5-30M US homes each year.