In Skåne, Blekinge and Kalmar counties, which the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency calls region 1, it is proposed that wind turbines in forest environments should be stationary under certain conditions, a method called "bat mode".
The proposal applies from dusk to dawn during the period from mid-July to mid-September, when the wind is less than six meters per second, as it is under such conditions that most bats are killed by the wings of wind turbines.
The greater brown bat species in particular would benefit from this.
In the rest of Sweden, bat activity is lower, as is mortality around wind turbines.
"Therefore, we have no general recommendation for management regulation in other parts of the country, only in region 1. And this applies to forest environments in the regions that we have investigated," says ecology researcher Stefan Pettersson in a press release from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.
The report shows that bat mortality was 60 percent lower at regulated power plants, compared to unregulated ones.
