A Cost-Effective Wildlife Activity and Mortality Detection System

There are many issues that a wind developer must consider when siting a wind project, but one that has become increasingly pressing in the U.S. is the effect of turbines on local wildlife. New onshore wind development is occurring in the US Midwest, MidAtlantic and Northeast, and has brought wind plants into greater conflict with wildlife, especially bats. The burgeoning US offshore wind industry must also contend with these wildlife conflict issues. This creates significant barriers for the wind industry to hit the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Vision Report goals of supplying 20% of US electricity demand by 2030, and 35% by 2050. To reduce those barriers, we propose an automated wildlife activity and mortality detection system that will address both the cost and precision of estimating wildlife activity and mortality around wind turbines. It is only through this understanding that more effective and cost-efficient methods for reducing the turbine impacts will be found. The innovation proposed is to develop a hardware and software package solution to monitor the air space around the turbine to directly quantify the amount and timing of these wildlife interactions. The result will be a field-ready system that can provide 24/7 monitoring. During Phase I, commercial-off-the-shelf thermal cameras and a millimeter wave radar were evaluated. Both sensors were tested on surrogates to determine the performance of the different technologies under a variety of field condition. We found promise in both technologies for detecting wildlife. Phase II will focus on creating and validating a prototype thermal camera-based systems while in parallel developing an optimized millimeter wave radar sensor for longer range detection. This product would be offered directly to wind developer and operators. It will be able to reduce the amount of turbine curtailment needed to conserve species while at the same time reducing the manual searches required for monitoring a wind plants wildlife impacts. This would both reduce the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for a plant will at the same time increasing energy yield and therefore revenue. This would allow for more profitable onshore and offshore wind projects without compromising the long-term viability of wildlife species.