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CEC-PIER: Funded Projects
Identifying Electric Distribution Poles for Retrofitting to Reduce Raptor Mortality
Contract #: 500-01-032
Contractor: University of California, Santa Cruz
Subcontractor: BioResource Consultants
Contractor Project Manager: Brian Walton
Subcontract Project Managers: Carl G. Thelander
Commission Project Manager: Linda Spiegel
Commission Contract Manager: Linda Spiegel
The Issue
Californians depend on millions of electric distribution poles to supply power to their homes and businesses. Utilities built most of this electric distribution system many years ago with little understanding of its effects on birds. It has been learned that many of the poles pose electrocution hazards to birds. Patterns of association between fatalities and pole attributes need to be identified with reasonable confidence so that appropriate remedial actions can be taken to reduce avian mortality at poles posing the highest risk.
The utility industry needs a scientifically-based, uniform determination of where to direct limited resources (i.e., rate-payer dollars) toward solving this chronic environmental problem. They need to know which types of poles, with which types of hardware configurations or environmental settings, represent the highest priority for directing their retrofitting efforts. Reducing bird electrocutions will result in compliance with industry-established ‘bird-safe’ power pole configuration standards, with environmental laws and regulations, and will improve their distribution system’s safety and reliability.
Anticipated Benefits for California
This research will provide any public or private utility that operates power lines for distribution with the means to estimate avian mortality due to electrocutions, to identify those poles with the highest risk of possibly causing a raptor electrocution, and to apply this information to improve the overall safety and reliability of their distribution system by reducing raptor electrocutions.
Project Description
During 2004, the contractor was hired by Southern California Edison (and PG&E) to perform the fieldwork, data analysis, and reporting on a PIER-EA funded research project on electrocutions in the SCE and PG&E service territories. Using a scientific approach to estimating the frequency of bird electrocutions in conjunction with patterns of association for numerous variables, the study’s objective was to test and improve an early, prototype risk determination rating system that had been developed previously by BRC for Southern California Edison. The rating system was intended to help predict power poles most likely to cause a raptor electrocution. While the early prototype system proved promising, new research has shown that it may be greatly improved with further research and using larger sample sizes.
The focus of this new research is to revisit a large portion of the 2004-visited poles to locate a larger sample size of fatalities. No new attributes data will need to be collected, so the data collection for fatalities will move very quickly in comparison to the 2004 effort. Using this larger sample size of fatalities in association with our existing database on attributes exhibited by these poles will further enable us to meet the goals stated above.
Preliminary research results indicate that the distribution of bird electrocutions at power poles is not random or evenly distributed. As we suspected, certain pole configurations and environmental conditions are associated with fatalities more than would be expected by chance alone. Also, relatively little is known about the frequency of bird electrocutions on power poles, or about the relative magnitude of the hazards posed by the power line distribution system as compared to the hazards posed by electric generation and transmission.
This research will obtain new data that are compatible and combinable with data already collected on the patterns of association between fatalities and pole attributes. To supplement the existing data to develop more reliable test results, a larger sample of fatalities is needed than was obtained during the 2004 effort. As a subtask, we will monitor the rate at which bird carcasses disappear from where they are discovered, a necessary parameter for more accurately estimating mortality than was possible previously. By doing so, we can (1) better estimate mortality as the number of fatalities per 100 poles per year; (2) generate more reliable tests for association than were possible previously; and, (3) test more hypotheses of factors suspected to be related to avian electrocutions than were possible with the 2004 data.
Final Report
The final report on the results of this work will be available by Dec. 30, 2007.
Contact
Carl G. Thelander
BioResource Consultants
P.O. Box 1539
Ojai, CA 93024-1539
805-646-3932
