A review of the effectiveness of operational curtailment for reducing bat fatalities at terrestrial wind farms in North America

Abstract

Curtailment of turbine operations during low wind conditions has become an operational minimization tactic to reduce bat mortality at terrestrial wind energy facilities. Site-specific studies have demonstrated that bat activity is higher during lower wind speeds and that operational curtailment can effectively reduce fatalities. However, the exact nature of the relationship between curtailment cut-in speed and bat fatality reduction remains unclear. To evaluate the efficacy of differing curtailment regimes in reducing bat fatalities, we examined data from turbine curtailment experiments in the United States and Canada in a meta-analysis framework. We used multiple statistical models to explore possible linear and non-linear relationships between turbine cut-in speed and bat fatality. Because the overall sample size for this meta-analysis was small (n = 36 control-treatment studies from 17 wind farms), we conducted a power analysis to assess the number of control-treatment curtailment studies needed to understand the relationship between fatality reduction and change in cut-in speed. We also identified the characteristics of individual curtailment field studies that may influence their power to detect fatality reductions, and in turn, contribute to future meta-analyses. We found strong evidence that implementing turbine curtailment reduces fatality rates of bats at wind farms; the estimated fatality ratio across all studies was 0.37 (p < 0.001), or a 63% decrease in fatalities. However, the nature of the relationship between the magnitude of treatment and reduction in fatalities was more difficult to assess. Models that represented the response ratio as a continuous variable (e.g., with a linear relationship between the change in cut-in speed and fatalities) and a categorical variable (to allow for possible non-linearity in this relationship) both had substantial support when compared using AICc. The linear model represented the best fit, likely due to model simplicity, but the non-linear model was the most likely without accounting for parsimony and suggested fatality rates decreased when the difference in curtailment cut-in speeds was 2m/s or larger. The power analyses showed that the power to detect effects in the meta-analysis was low if fatality reductions were less than 50%, which suggests that smaller increases in cut-in speed (i.e., between different treatment categories) may not be easily detectable with the current dataset. While curtailment is an effective operational mitigation measure overall, additional well-designed curtailment studies are needed to determine precisely whether higher cut-in speeds can further reduce bat fatalities.