The return of bat activity around wind farms each spring raises an important operational question for wind energy operators: how to protect bats while limiting unnecessary production losses.
In many regions, this challenge is commonly addressed through preventive curtailment, where turbines are stopped based on predefined weather conditions such as wind speed and temperature. While effective in reducing risk, this approach often results in long shutdown periods regardless of the actual presence of bats.
At Biodiv-Wind, we have long believed that mitigation strategies should be based on real biological activity rather than only environmental proxies.
This is why we developed AudioBat, an acoustic monitoring system capable of detecting bat activity in real time and triggering turbine curtailment only when bats are actually present near the turbines.
To better quantify the benefits of this approach, we conducted a field comparison on a wind farm over a seven-month period (April to November), evaluating the performance of preventive curtailment against dynamic curtailment triggered by AudioBat detections.
The results highlight a significant difference between the two strategies. Preventive curtailment led to several thousand hours of turbine shutdown and substantial production losses, while the dynamic approach dramatically reduced downtime by stopping turbines only when bat activity was detected.
At the same time, the AudioBat-based strategy ensured full coverage of detected bat activity throughout the monitoring period.
This study illustrates how dynamic curtailment strategies can help balance biodiversity protection with renewable energy production, by targeting mitigation measures only when they are truly necessary.
We share the full results and methodology in the presentation below.
Enjoy the read!
