In two weeks, we will be attending the Conference on Wind Energy & Wildlife Impacts (CWW), the leading international event on wind energy and its interaction with biodiversity.
Now in its eighth year, the conference will be held in Montpellier, France, from September 8 to 12, and is co-organized by France Renouvelables and our colleagues at Biotope.
We will be presenting a special feature of our ecological simulation software SimOïko, specifically designed to analyze the risk of collision between flying species and wind turbines.
This module, which we have been using in our studies since 2021, models the movements of these species (e.g., birds of prey and bats) when they are searching for food.
It is based on the CPF (Central Place Foraging) ecological model: we simulate individuals leaving their nests to search for food resources, moving within the landscape according to the natural environments they encounter, and returning to the nest once they have found the food they are looking for or have traveled a maximum distance.
This can help wind farm developers anticipate the impacts of their projects, implement the ERC (avoid, reduce, compensate) sequence, and optimize the future operation of their facilities
- locate areas where installation should be prohibited because the number of flying species passing near the towers and blades (and therefore the risk of collision) would be too high;
- test and compare the effectiveness of collision risk reduction scenarios, such as the installation of deterrent systems designed to scare away individuals that come too close to the towers;
- evaluate, for wind turbines equipped with them, the likely frequency of activation of the automatic blade shutdown system (which occurs when a flying animal is detected nearby) and the resulting loss of production;
- identify areas that allow for effective compensation for any residual impacts (by demonstrating that the ecological gains generated by the compensatory measures are equivalent to the losses caused by the project).