Does painting wind turbine blades black stop birds dying
Does painting wind turbine blades black stop birds dying is a question researchers have now tested twice in the field, with 2 different answers. At the Smola wind farm in Norway, a team from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research painted 1 of the 3 blades on each of 4 turbines black in August 2013, then compared bird deaths at those turbines against 4 nearby unpainted control turbines. Over a 10 year study, from 2006 to 2016, researchers using trained dogs searched for carcasses 1,275 times across all 8 turbines, counting 7.5 years of deaths before the paint went on and 3.5 years after. At the painted turbines, annual bird deaths fell by 71.9%, from 11 deaths before painting to 6 after. At the unpainted control turbines over the same years, deaths rose, from 7 to 18. The paper itself states a 95% confidence interval of 61.8% to 79.1% around that 71.9% figure, a range statisticians use to show how much a result could shift if the same study ran again.
Norway study, 4 painted turbines against 4 unpainted control turbines, 2006 to 2016.
Show the numbers
| Control before | 7 |
| Control after | 18 |
| Painted before | 11 |
| Painted after | 6 |
The drop held for large birds of prey too. No white tailed eagle carcass turned up at a painted turbine after the paint went on, against 6 found there in the years before painting. At the unpainted control turbines, 1 eagle carcass was found before painting and none after.
Same Norway study and turbines as the first chart, white tailed eagles only.
Show the numbers
| Control before | 1 |
| Control after | 0 |
| Painted before | 6 |
| Painted after | 0 |
A bigger trial found black blades did not stop birds dying in the Netherlands
A bigger trial found black blades did not stop birds dying in the Netherlands. At Windpark Eemshaven, a wind farm on the Dutch coast inside a busy industrial port, the ecological research firm Waardenburg Ecology painted 1 blade black on 7 of the 14 turbines at the site in September 2022, after a baseline year of counting deaths in 2021, then kept watching for 2 more years.
The analyses did not reveal a significant effect of the black blade in the Eemshaven.
Waardenburg Ecology, the ecological research firm that ran the Eemshaven study, in its own written result. Source 4.
The null result held across every species group studied, not just the total count, Waardenburg Ecology reported, source 4. RWE, the company that operates the wind farm, says the black blade did not stand out enough against the busy industrial background at Eemshaven to change how birds behaved near it.
Why background decides whether a black blade works
Why background decides whether a black blade works comes down to contrast. Smola sits on open, uncluttered coastline, where a black blade breaks up the blur a spinning rotor makes against open sky. Eemshaven sits inside a busy industrial port, where a black blade blends into cranes, buildings and other dark moving shapes nearby, according to the wind farm operator and the ecological research firm behind the study. A related study at the same Dutch site, tracking how often birds changed their flight path near a turbine, found no difference whether the turbine carried a black blade or not.
Their evolution, I suppose, hasn't primed them necessarily to expect obstacles in their foraging space.
Alex Banks, an ornithologist at Natural England, speaking to a reporter. Source 5.
A fix proven at 1 wind farm does not automatically work at another with a different backdrop. The utility PacifiCorp and the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute are now running their own black blade trial aimed at eagles at a wind farm in Wyoming, with no result yet, since the trial is still running.