On September 26, at 11 a.m., an environmental expert hired by Duke Energy to survey its North Allegheny Windpower Project in western Pennsylvania found the body of a small, brown bat more than 300 feet beneath the spinning blades
On September 26, at 11 a.m., an environmental expert hired by Duke Energy to survey its North Allegheny Windpower Project in western Pennsylvania found the body of a small, brown bat more than 300 feet beneath the spinning blades of a wind turbine. Duke didn’t wait for a directive from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The company immediately suspended night operations of the wind farm and sent the carcass to the USFWS for evaluation.
Though wind turbines frequently kill bats—hundreds of thousands each year—this was an endangered Indiana bat, only the third ever found dead at a wind farm. Scientists estimate that there are 387,000 Indiana bats in existence, a roughly 50 percent decrease in the population since 1967, when the bat was listed as an endangered species. Duke had to balance suspending energy production that could power up to 21,000 homes against a potential lawsuit. In 2009, an environmental group filed suit over the mere presence of an Indiana bat in West Virginia, halting the construction of a proposed wind farm. “There certainly is an economic hit for suspending nighttime operations,” says Greg Efthimiou, a spokesman for Duke Energy Renewables. “But we felt that was the price of doing the right thing while we analyzed the potential cause and potential hazards to additional bats.”
The decision highlights a conflict between two federal environmental initiatives that are increasingly at odds with one another: the protection of endangered species and the development of alternative energy. In the past four years, wind-energy production has nearly quad