Wind operator fined $35M for 150 eagle deaths, setting $29,623-per-bird precedent

In a Wyoming courtroom in April 2022, the federal government and a wind energy company arrived at a number that would define how America prices the death of its national symbol: $29,623 per eagle. ESI Energy, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources, pleaded guilty to violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and admitted to killing at least 150 bald and golden eagles across 50 of its 154 wind facilities since 2012. The company agreed to pay $1.86 million in fines, $6.21 million in restitution, and commit up to $27 million toward prevention measures over five years of probation. For every eagle that dies during that probation period despite those efforts, ESI will pay the government $29,623—a figure derived from the Fish and Wildlife Service's standard calculation for compensatory mitigation, the cost of offsetting one eagle death by retrofitting power poles and reducing electrocutions elsewhere.

The scale of the admitted killing was staggering. Of the 150 eagles dead since 2012, 136 had been confirmed as blade strikes. Some individual turbines had killed multiple birds. The facilities stretched across eight states: Wyoming, New Mexico, North Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, and California. Yet the Justice Department's case was not fundamentally about the body count. Prosecutors argued that ESI's crime was something more deliberate: the company had built and operated these projects for over a decade without obtaining the federal permits that the law requires, permits that exist precisely to authorize and manage the risk of eagle deaths. In some cases, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had explicitly warned that specific sites were dangerous for eagles. ESI proceeded anyway, never applying for the permits that would have imposed costs, delays, and design constraints on its competitors who did follow the law. The violation, in the government's view, functioned as a competitive advantage—a way to move faster and cheaper than operators willing to play by the rules.

NextEra's leadership did not accept this framing without resistance. Rebecca Kujawa, the company's president, argued that bird collisions with turbines are unavoidable accidents and should not be criminalized. She said the company disagreed with the government's enforcement theory, a position that resonates within an industry long frustrated by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act's strict liability—the legal principle that makes every smokestack, power line, and turbine a potential defendant regardless of intent. Despite that disagreement, ESI took the plea. The settlement stands as the largest criminal penalty ever imposed on a wind operator for bird deaths.

The per-eagle price tag is not arbitrary. The Fish and Wildlife Service has long used compensatory mitigation to translate ecological loss into enforceable currency. The logic is cold but deliberate: $29,623 buys the eagle population a replacement life, most commonly by making power poles safer so that electrocutions decline elsewhere. The calculation matters most for golden eagles, whose population in the American West remains flat or declining, burdened by electrocution, lead poisoning, poaching, collisions, and habitat loss. Bald eagles have recovered and are now abundant; golden eagles have not. The government estimates that illegal takes of golden eagles across all causes run in the thousands per year, making every turbine strike a line item in a population that cannot afford it.

The case leaves uncomfortable questions that will outlast the settlement. A price per eagle makes conservation enforceable and auditable—it converted one company's decade of silence into $35 million of fines, restitution, and mandated prevention. It also reduces a protected species to a line item. Wildlife advocates argue that $29,623 undervalues a golden eagle. Industry argues that criminal law is the wrong tool for accidental collisions. Both sides point to a deeper fix: siting turbines away from eagle country in the first place would be worth more than any invoice. What the Cheyenne plea established is a precedent. The eagle now has a price. The price has a paper trail. And the cheapest eagle, as the permit system tried to tell ESI all along, is the one the blade never meets.