Resource Library Category: Property values (69 items)
Documents presented here are not the product of nor are they necessarily endorsed by National Wind Watch. This resource library is provided to assist anyone wishing to research the issue of industrial wind power and the impacts of its development. The information should be evaluated by each reader to come to their own conclusions about the many areas of debate.
Field fragmentation
Source: Bembinster, Jim
Wisconsin farmers sign on with wind developers because it seems like easy money. They are told they can farm right up to the turbine foundations. They are told about a quarter acre of land will be taken out of production for each turbine.
What they are not told is there will be access roads and trenching for each turbine that will go where the developer wants them to go, crossing at diagonals in the middle of fields, and in some areas compacting the soil so badly crop production is affected and drain tiles are crushed. The farmer is not told that they’ve given the wind company the right to use the land as it wishes. It’s all in the contract, if you know how to read a contract, or take that contract to a lawyer to read over for you.
The photos below were recently taken by Jim Bembinster. They show a wind project in Columbia County being built by We Energies and the newly fragmented farm fields. [via Better Plan, Wisconsin]
Why pro-wind studies often use a 10 km radius
Source: Salt, Alec
Last week I was reading of an Australian study, by a Professor Gary Wittert, which had shown sleeping pill usage for those living near wind turbines was no greater than the general population . The study compared those living within 10 km of turbines with those living more than 10 km away. There have been similar studies with property values using a 5 mile or 10 km radius that showed property values are not affected by wind turbines. Had you ever thought why they pick a 10 km radius?
Consider this graphic. It shows 1 km bands with the calculated area for each band shown in blue.
Let’s keep it easy and assume that households are evenly distributed and there is one household for every 10 square kilometers.
So, within 2 km (the two innermost bands) of the turbine, the area is 3.1 + 9.4 km² (=12.5 km²) which would represent 1.2 households.
Now let’s consider the two outermost (9 km and 10 km) bands. The area of these bands is 53.4 + 59.7 km² (=113.1 km²) which represents 11.3 households. So the outermost bands have about TEN TIMES the number of households of those living within 2 km, making sure that the contribution of the inner bands is diluted, swamped, covered up or however else you would describe it.
Or consider if you live within 2 km of a turbine. The outer bands of those living from 2–10 km from the turbine adds up to 301.6 km², which would represent 30.1 households – which is 24 TIMES the number of households within 2 km.
No wonder your voice is being “drowned out”. The bigger the circle, the more “dilution” occurs.
Add this to the list of things where “size matters”, and next time you see a study like this, consider the radius and area that was chosen. The choice of the circle size plays a major role in the result obtained and speaks volumes about the motivation of the author.
by Alec Salt, Professor, Department of Otolaryngology, Washington University School of Medicine
via Wind Concerns Ontario
Values in the Wind: A Hedonic Analysis of Wind Power Facilities
Source: Heintzelman, Martin; and Tuttle, Carrie
ABSTRACT: The siting of wind facilities is extremely controversial. This paper uses data on 11,369 property transactions over 9 years in Northern New York to explore the effects of new wind facilities on property values. We use a repeat-sales framework to control for omitted variables and endogeneity biases. We find that nearby wind facilities significantly reduce property values. Decreasing the distance to the nearest turbine to 1 mile results in a decline in price of between 7.73% and 14.87%. These results indicate that there re- mains a need to compensate local homeowners/communities for allowing wind development within their borders.
Download original document: “Values in the Wind”
Wind Turbines (Minimum Distance from Residential Premises) Bill
Source: U.K. House of Lords
Lord Reay: My Lords, in introducing the Bill I should like to declare an interest: I live within one and a half kilometres of a wind farm that is in the pre-planning application stage and which would be disallowed under the provisions in this Bill because of its proximity to my house and, I am told, to about 600 other houses, which would all be within two kilometres of the 110 metre-high turbines.
There are many reasons to be opposed to the Government’s policy towards wind farms and I agree with most of them. But this Bill only concerns itself with one disadvantage of onshore wind turbines – their propensity for making life a misery for those unlucky enough to find themselves forced to live in their shadow.
There is now a well-established body of evidence, collected worldwide, that demonstrates the harmful effect of turbines for at least some of those who live close to them. Complaints are made continuously to the environmental health officers of local authorities. In February 2009 the Renewable Energy Foundation produced a roll, obtained under freedom of information requests, of 27 out of 133 wind farms in the United Kingdom which had given rise to noise complaints. This number subsequently rose to 46 out of 217 wind farms by April 2010, with 285 complaints having been recorded in total.
In her book Wind Turbine Syndrome, Dr Nina Pierpont recorded and analysed the symptoms of a number of families in different parts of the world who had been driven out of their homes by their sufferings from wind farms. Dr Pierpont concludes that a minimum setback distance of two kilometres should be required, also that developers should be obliged to buy out effected families at the pre-turbine value of their homes.
Jane Davis is another famous authority on the subject, and a victim herself. Driven from her Lincolnshire home by a wind farm that appeared within 1,000 metres upwind of her, she has fought for the last five years for recognition and compensation. She goes to the High Court in July in a case expected to last for 12 days. In the very recent BBC2 series “Windfarm Wars”, which chronicled with admirable fair-mindedness the story of a Devon wind farm application, at Den Brook Valley, viewers will have seen Jane Davis’s evidence, together with plenty of other examples of the intolerable consequences for some people of having to live close to such developments.
Only the day before yesterday an account appeared in a local newspaper, the North Devon Gazette, under the heading “Our Sleepless Nights with Wind Turbines”, of a Torrington couple who were being forced to sell their home and business following a planning inspector’s decision to overrule Torridge District Council and allow a wind farm within 500 metres of their home.
“I can hear the turbines through my pillow at night”,
the wife was quoted as saying.
“It’s unbelievable the noise they make sometimes”,
said her husband.
Wind farm noise differs from other continuous forms of noise, for example the noise from a nuclear power station. It has a rhythmic, pulsing quality, with at times a vibrating effect which many have found too invasive and disturbing to live with. It can quite obviously seriously damage people’s health. There are many illustrations of this in Dr Pierpont’s book.
But there is another baleful effect, which is more than visual or aural. This derives from the scale of the turbines. So vast have they become – the largest currently in the planning process being over 600 feet high, twice the height of Big Ben – that the more humane inspectors, those few who have chosen not to be ruthless agents for enforcing the Government’s renewable energy policy, have described them as dominating, intimidating, blighting for a generation the lives of those who have to live under them, and have rejected applications on that score.
So except by hoping to be lucky in the choice of the inspector that is parachuted in on them from Bristol, how can local communities hope to defend themselves against the threat of this nuisance to their lives? …
