And so I grew from colt to stallion, as wild and as reckless as thunder over the land. Racing with the eagle, soaring with the wind. Flying? There were times I believed I could.

As true as all this is, turbines are a bigger risk to bats than birds. Several reasons - one is the air pressure changes from the blades cause 'barotrauma', which triggers internal bleeding. Another is that many bats are literally attracted to wind turbines, for reasons we still don't understand. The average US figure is that every turbine kills 12.25 bats, which doesn't sound like a lot until you multiply by the 70,800 turbines in the country and realise that means 863,625 bats a year (particularly tree roosting bat species, which account for about 80% of those). And that's just America - it's 14.3 per turbine across central Europe, and in Victoria, Australia, it's between 7 - 10.3 per turbine.

And, offshore turbines' interference and impacts on marine life (particularly cetaceans and their echolocation) is still poorly studied and understood. And I haven't even mentioned invertebrates, look, whose populations are plummeting, and yet are dramatically under-researched.

But like... this is one of those topics that people love to binarise (like genetic modification, 'organic' farming, and a bunch of other environmental things), with one side going "They're useless and ugly and terrible and we shouldn't have them!", while the other goes "Actually the real issue is climate change and they're completely fine and anyone who disagrees is repeating Big Oil propaganda!" and the truth is both in the middle and more nuanced than all that. I mean, for one thing... birds really do get the whole spotlight when discussing the wildlife impacts, and really shouldn't, as mentioned.

But also...

Turbines come into their own in remote areas of medium wind-speed (around 34mph without too much blustering), where one to a handful of turbines can be deployed to small scale settlements that are relatively isolated. In these conditions, they are fantastic. Small Welsh village half way up a mountain? Fab. Collection of farms miles out into the countryside? Great. They're relatively cheap and easy to install, require relatively little maintenance, they give energy resilience and sustainability, and one or two here and there are not going to drive anything to extinction any time soon. Not even bats that are curiously obsessed with the damn things. In this area, turbines are Gods.

But what they're not good for is large scale installations in areas that regularly experience low or high wind speeds. They need a minimum of about 10mph in wind speed to start working, and shut down at 56mph. And they aren't good at blustery winds, so those need to be fairly steady windspeeds. Meanwhile, wind that is 'harvested' by a turbine will obviously have its flow pattern and speed altered as it continues on its path, because that's physics - with a handful of turbines this is not a problem. But several hundred placed together in a big farm? They steal each other's wind. This means large windfarms are progressively less energy efficient after a certain point.

And, in reference to the Bat Thing... older wind farms that pre-date bat-friendly legislation on positioning are still there, en masse, in bat migration routes, killing bats. And on top of THAT, bat-friendly rotational speeds for turbines are not the speeds windfarm owners want to use, because they are slower than Maximum Generation (there's a process you can look up called 'curtailment', which activists are now pushing for in a lot of turbine-rich areas).

And furthermore, turbines' massive environmental advantage - the lowest emissions-production of any energy generating technology - is counterbalanced to a greater or lesser extent by their disadvantage - the shortest efficient operational lifespan of the main energy-generating technologies. A tidal lagoon will run for 120 years, a nuclear plant for 80, a coal plant for 60, solar panels (size and quality dependent) for 30, and wind turbines for 15-20; of which they lose efficiency after just 10 years (I've seen some papers suggest 7 years, though that was a few years back now; new ones are likely better, but that does mean still-active older ones... aren't great). Offshore is often worse, because of salt spray on the materials and mechanism. And we're still struggling to work out how to recycle the blades once they're decommissioned, and what to do about the big concrete bases, and the nature of big windfarms is that they often get built in vital climate-countering habitat like upland peat bogs anyway which destroys the peat...

But because they're the cheapest option, governments like them, and so over-invest into areas and big windfarms they shouldn't so that they can show statistics about their green spending to voters. And so turbines get used massively inappropriately in a way that would be better spent on other options; and then their critics focus on how this means they're inefficient and ugly and useless, and their supporters talk about their advantages and successes when used right, and neither side addresses the fact that the real issue is that they're being used completely wrong.

Turbines are a super important element of a healthy, diverse energy matrix with a minimal environmental impact WHEN USED APPROPRIATELY. Even with bats! Just like OP's comment about painting one blade reducing birdstrike, there are ways of reducing the impacts to bats, birds, and a whole bunch of others. This is why all major wildlife organisations around the globe, including bat ones, actually support wind power development.

But we are not using them appropriately, and unlike what a hell of a lot of the tags and comments on this post seem to think, it's not fossil fuel propaganda to point out that causing a brand new ecological problem for endangered species when you don't even have to and could avoid it is something we should be stopping. Like there are people in the notes saying "If we don't halt climate change there won't be birds anyway, because we'll have destroyed their habitat!" Yeah. Yeah, that's true. But also... we aren't painting one blade on every turbine black, are we? Even though we know that reduces avian mortality. So we are deliberately incorporating Extra Bird Death into our Save The Birds method, and that's... bad, actually. We do not need to do that. We don't actually have to trade off one against the other. And uh. We absolutely should be criticising that. Ironically, "we have to choose one or the other" is actually exactly what Big Oil propaganda is aiming to make everyone think - those commenters are just coming down on the opposite side of the 'choice'.