It’s official – wind farms can badly damage the value of your property
Now it’s official: wind turbines can cause a noise nuisance and drastically damage the value of your property.
After enduring unremitting noise and vibration from wind turbines 930m from their home at Deeping St Nicholas in Lincolnshire, Jane and Julian Davis abandoned their property last year. They are now renting a house some miles away in order to escape the noise and get some sleep. This is costing them £1,000 a month.
Local estate agents say that their house, worth £170,000 before the wind farm was built in 2006, is now so severely blighted that it is unsaleable.
A Valuation Tribunal has now heard their case and has reduced their council tax in recognition of “significant detrimental effect”, “nuisance real, not imagined” and “potential sale price affected”.
Despite the tribunal’s findings, Jane Davis has been advised that they stand no chance of getting any compensation from the turbine operators.
In 2004, a district judge ruled that wind farms can ruin the peace of the countryside and damage the value of nearby homes. He found that the value of a house in Marton, in the Lake District, fell significantly because of the construction of a wind farm of seven 40m turbines 500m away. Damages were awarded, not against the wind farm builders or operators, but against the vendors of the property because they had failed to tell the buyers about the wind farm proposal.
Hundreds of people in the North East are facing the threat of 100m to 163m high turbines being built close to their homes.
The minuscule benefit of the generation of a small amount of highly subsidised, erratic and intermittent electricity will only be achieved at the cost of soaring electricity bills, frozen investment in turbine areas, blighted property and, now, the loss of council tax revenues.
DON BROWNLOW, Norham, Northumberland (website: www.moorsydeactiongroup.org.uk)
The Journal
6 August 2008
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
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