Now's your chance, AI, to do good. Protect endangered eagles from wind turbines
- Reference: 1663745232
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/09/21/germany_ai_eagles_turbines/
- Source link:
As Moscow puts the squeeze on gas supplies to Europe, Chancellor Olaf Scholz reckons building more and more wind turbine farms will – along with reactivated coal and oil power stations – help his nation wean itself off Russian fossil fuels by making up any shortfall in energy supply.
However, conservationists are worried about the turbines harming wildlife. Scholz's coalition government controversially scrapped restrictions preventing wind turbines from being built near bird nesting spots, and is in favor of adopting machine-learning technology that could help protect rare birds of prey, such as the lesser spotted eagles, from flying into turbine blades.
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If everything goes according to plan, cameras built by US startup IdentiFlight will be rolled out to look out for eagles flying near Germany's coastline over the next few weeks, The Guardian [2]first reported . Capabilities to detect the lesser spotted eagles are scheduled to be deployed in 2023.
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Will it even work? Very good question.
IdentiFlight's technology has been installed at over 150 wind farms in North America, Australia, and Europe. A set of eight wide-field cameras sit atop a tower and feed footage into software trained to detect and classify specific protected bird species in the images. If the algorithms predict a bird is about to fly into a spinning wind turbine, the arms are slowed in a matter of seconds to reduce the risk of a lethal collision. The system has a 1km (0.6 mile) range, we're told.
[5]Japanese eggheads strap AI-powered backpacks to seagulls
[6]Modeling software spins up plans for floating wind turbines
[7]Object-recognition AI – the dumb program's idea of a smart program: How neural nets are really just looking at textures
[8]Raven geniuses: Four-month-old corvids have similar cognitive abilities to great apes at same age, study finds
Estimates of how many birds are killed by wind turbines in America every year vary from hundreds of thousands of birds to millions. Wind farm operators don't bother protecting all types of birds, and are only careful towards the most endangered species protected by environmental laws.
ESI Energy [9]pleaded guilty to violating three counts of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act earlier this year, and admitted at least 150 bald and golden eagles had died across 50 of its 154 wind turbine farms across America since 2012.
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IdentiFlight uses a mixture of computer vision techniques and convolutional neural networks in its attempt to detect protected avian life. The number of birds saved each year depends on the wind farm's location; some may be near migratory paths of specific species or near nesting sites. In Europe, IdentiFlight runs roughly five to six models to track different types of birds.
The company declined to discuss costs with us – as in, is this stuff actually effective enough to be worth the money – and pointed to a [11]previous study that estimated its technology reduced eagle fatalities by 82 per cent.
"IdentiFlight was created to facilitate the development and operation of the wind energy business by promoting the successful coexistence of avian wildlife and wind energy," a representative told The Register .
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"IdentiFlight can lessen the pressures upon wind farm developers and operators by providing a sophisticated tool to detect protected avian species and also provide operators an effective means to protect select species from collision with rotating wind turbine blades.
"The IdentiFlight Mission is to further growth of renewable energy by minimizing wildlife impacts while maximizing energy production. By empowering wind farm operators with highly targeted, informed and objective curtailment decisions, unnecessary and costly interruptions are avoided and conservation of protected species is achieved." ®
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[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/20/germany-hopes-ai-can-stop-rare-eagles-flying-into-wind-turbines
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/03/ai_bird_backpacks/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/17/sandia_wind_turbines/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2019/02/13/ai_image_texture/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/14/ravens_study_nature_prof_interview/
[9] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/esi-energy-llc-wholly-owned-subsidiary-nextera-energy-resources-llc-sentenced-after-pleading
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[11] https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1365-2664.13831
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[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Snake-Oil
Probably it means feathering the blades to be flat on to the rotation direction, meaning you have the drag of most of the blade being stalled to slow it down. That can indeed slow a turbine down in a matter of seconds. Pretty sure however the feathering and generating equipment in the wind turbine and the grid in general won't like it.
(Also, don't underestimate just how strong the brakes in one of those turbines is. If they're able to stop a turbine in high wind conditions when one of the blades can't feather, they should also be capable of slowing the rotor down in lower wind, especially if the blades feather out too)
Unconvinced
As mentioned by others, that's a lot of heavy braking to slow the turbines in time.
Having seen an eagle (short toed) hit a turbine*, its not a good sight
* Spain, near Gibraltar straits, a big bird migration area. The turbines did get "turned off" at certain "peak" migratory times to avoid fatalities, unfortunately this is a decision based on number of birds passing through the area - and in this case, numbers were below the "critical amount" so turbines were on.
Or they could just paint one of the blades a different colour which allows the birds to understand that there is an object moving and stay away.
Single black blade helps tremendously
Recent studies have also shown that putting a black band on only one of the blades (or even making the entire blade black) helps tremendously in making birds understand their motion and stay away. Operators don't like it because the black blade heats up much more in the sun and it's lifetime is severely reduced because of it. GFRP doesn't like heat.
Re: Single black blade helps tremendously
That's why the registration numbers on GFRP gliders are grey, not black.
Re: Single black blade helps tremendously
Yay! Came here to say exactly that.
As far as I know only the single-black-blade scheme has been tried. But would a more balanced match of thermal absorption across other colours be feasible? Depending on the paint mixes, maybe a yellow blade and two green ones? Or say two light grey and one with a broad red stripe? This is really important research that needs to be done.
We could, of course, can this shit and remove the wind turbines
If you are worried about birds being killed by wind turbines, you will shit yourself when you realise how many birds are going to be killed by climate change.
Snake-Oil
I am struggling to see how this actually works.
I claims that the blades can be slowed in a matter of seconds, and I simply don't believe it. The overhead of running, loss of output and wear on the equipment just don't stack up.
To slow a large turbine "in a matter of seconds" so that it does not mince wildlife requires a substantial brake and that is going to put significant stresses on everything.
Something does not stack up.