Wellfleet Energy Committee addresses wind turbine concerns
WELLFLEET – Not everybody in Wellfleet is delighted by the prospect of a 400-foot-high industrial wind turbine being installed at White Crest Beach.
That’s clear from the questions the Wellfleet Energy Committee has had to answer publicly at its meetings, and personally, by e-mail, to citizens who have raised many inquiries about the financial feasibility of a wind turbine, the impact it will have on the environment and their property values.
At their meeting last Thursday, committee members approved a response two of their members drafted to long e-mails they’ve received from Eric Bibler, one of the critics of the project. Griswold Draz, committee chair, informed them that they’ve received several new letters asking questions about the project, including one from a resident near the proposed project, who hoped the committee would be more open with the public about the plans.
This struck a nerve with committee member Jim Sexton, who said he’s given 19 public presentations on the project since the committee first started working on it in four years ago.
The committee agreed that it will respond to all questions it receives by mail or e-mail, though it may not be as quick a response as some would like. As member Paul Banner put it, the committee feels it is often going over the same ground in responding to the questions received.
The big news at the group’s last meeting was that they had just received a copy of the Sound Analysis Report for the wind turbine project, prepared by Tech Environmental, which was favorable in content.
But even though the report was positive, Sexton said, “In light of everything we’re hearing about turbines and the noise they make, I think we should dig deeper down and try to figure out what is going on.” The committee was at one point considering putting three turbines at the White Crest Beach site, but then decided to go ahead with plans for just one.
Sexton said he suspected that a three-turbine array “is probably noisier than I expected,” and that a single turbine would be “much more quiet.”
He added that he has seen the two wind turbines in operation at Hull, and while one was very quiet, the other one, by the high school, was “not as quiet. There is some controversy over noise, and I think we need to wrestle that to the ground.”
Draz agreed with him. “Despite what appears to be a very favorable sound analysis, I would suggest that at some time in the new year we make a planned visit to Falmouth to see and hear for ourselves the two turbines operating there.”
Committee member Geof Karlson said he would visit a turbine in operation outside of Boston during the holidays and report his findings regarding noise problems.
The sound analysis “suggests that the turbine will be heard under certain circumstances and they do suggest the sound will not be audible to residents,” Draz said. “I certainly think that is true if the windows are closed.
But I do have a little bit of concern that on a calm night in the summer, when someone has a bed right next to a window that is downwind of it, the swishing sound would be heard inside their house. How loudly that would be is something we could talk about more,” he said, adding they could ask the author of the sound analysis report to give a public presentation of the results and respond to questions.
Karlson said many of the questions that have been presented to them are based on reports about turbines people have gathered from the Internet. While other towns have had problems with turbines, that does not mean that what Wellfleet is proposing would have the same problems, he said.
“We need to get data and find out the people affected, and how close they are to it …. Then we can say if it is comparable to what we are proposing. Certainly, if we have comparable situations, that’s the information that we want to look at.”
Karlson added, “It’s very easy for people to come up with reports about the thousands of turbines that have been in use and the reports of some installations that were not done in a good way. It’s not our responsibility to answer for every wind farm that was not installed prudently. What we need to do is answer for this proposal and to look seriously at situations that are comparable to it,” he said. “There isn’t anyone on this committee that would want to do something that is going to be onerous to anybody. We wouldn’t want that to happen to us and we wouldn’t want that to happen to anybody else.”
By Marilyn Miller
24 December 2009
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
Some possibly related stories:
The copyright of this article is owned by the author or publisher indicated. Its availability here constitutes a "fair use" as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law as well as in similar "fair dealing" exceptions of the copyright laws of other nations, as part of National Wind Watch's effort to advance understanding of the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development. For more information, click here.
