Resource Documents: General (97 items)
Documents presented here are not the product of nor are they necessarily endorsed by National Wind Watch. These resource documents are 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.
Report on Wind Turbines to the Town of Enfield
Author: Enfield Wind Farm Advisory Committee
Contents:
Report on Wind Turbines and Noise
Introduction
What Is Noise and How Is It Measured?
Complaints
Wind Turbine Syndrome
Vibroacoustic Disease
What Peer-Reviewed Literature Says
Conclusions and Recommendations
Wind Turbine Noise
Summary
Conclusions
Mitigations
Introduction
Animal Studies
Human Studies
Conclusion
Ice and Blade Fragment Throw
Introduction
Setback Mitigation
Other Mitigation Measures
Summary
Fire, Lightning, Mechanical Failure, Flicker and Other Miscellaneous Issues
Overview – Mechanical Failure, Fire, Lightning
Array Loss/Bearing Failure
Fire
Lightning
Foundation Failure/Turbine Collapse
Flicker
The Impact of Flicker on Horses
Stray Voltage
Lighting of Turbines
Aeroelastic Flutter Stability
Bibliography
Water Resources – Climate and Air Quality
Summary
Geology, Soils & Topography
Test Borings
Changes to the Turbines
Monitoring
Download original document: “Enfield Report on Wind Turbines”
Critical appraisal of the Biggar Economics research report ‘Wind farms and tourism trends in Scotland’
Executive summary of main points—
The reasons that Biggar Economics’ methodology is inappropriate are:
a. It focuses only on the correlation between wind farm construction and operation with employment trends – ignoring other major influences such as currency fluctuations or post 2007/8 recovery;
b. It uses a short and selective timeframe, ending in 2013 though official figures are available for 2014. If 2009 to 2014 had been used instead, stated employment growth across Scotland would have been much lower than the 2009-2013 figures, so it would not demonstrate a significant trend;
c. It includes spending by local and business people in hotels, restaurants and other sectors which is classed as ‘tourism-characteristic’ activities, though statistics professionals agree this ‘non-visitor’ spend will be at least 50% of the total;
d. It includes the large urban tourism sector in the all-Scotland figures when the contentious issue is impacts on nature and landscape tourism in rural and remote areas;
e. There is a circularity in including wind farm construction workers’ direct impacts on spending and employment multipliers (often cited by developers as a significant boost in its own right to local employment) as part of “tourism” figures;
f. Biggar Economics ignores the ONS caveats and methodological advice on small-scale studies (‘Measuring Tourism Locally’ Guidance Notes 1&2), especially the unreliability caused in small studies by using rounded ONS national survey figures inappropriately.
Douglas Wynn BSc (Soc) MSc (Econ)
An opinion for the John Muir Trust
Download original document: “Critical appraisal of the Biggar Economics research report ‘Wind farms and tourism trends in Scotland’”
Tiny the Turbine
Author: Ward, Lyndsey
The sun always seemed to shine in Giggly Glen and the people were always smiling.
It was a very happy to place to live.
But then something happened that made the people very sad.
This is the tale of Tiny the Turbine who lived in Giggly Glen, on a pretty little farm that was rented by Mr Barley from the rich landowner, Sir Snatchit.
Tiny really was tiny. No-one could see or hear him. He had sat on the roof of the cowshed for many years and was completely hidden by the big trees of Giggly Glen Forest. Hardly anyone knew he was there.
Mr Barley used him in the winter to charge a little battery to light his cowshed where he kept his cows in the cold dark months. Tiny could just about do that but nothing else and spent the summer sunbathing and watching the wildlife all
around him. When the wind didn’t blow Mr Barley had to use a torch to tend his animals.
Mr Barley had a son, Ally. He was Tiny’s friend and would often go and talk to Tiny. Ally didn’t have many friends but Tiny was always there to listen when he had problems at school.
One day a wind developer called Mr McWeasel went to see Sir Snatchit.
He said because Sir Snatchit already had Tiny on his land he could get many more turbines, much much bigger ones. It would be called an extension and the man from the Government would say yes.
Mr McWeasel said if he could have permission to build the other turbines he could make Tiny much bigger and make him work harder and bring in lots more money from the Government. They would both be very rich.
He also said he would give the villagers a very small bit of that money the turbines made. It was the same money that the villagers had to pay to the Government in the first place. So really he was just giving the people their own money back. Mr McWeasel didn’t tell anyone that though.
Mr Barley didn’t want Tiny made bigger. Tiny did all he needed and didn’t bother anyone. The big turbines could be a problem for him and his family as they would be very close to their little house.
But because Sir Snatchit owned all the land and said yes to Mr McWeasel, the building of the turbines began.
Tiny was shocked when he saw Mr McWeasel’s men at work. They ripped up all the ground with big diggers, they cut down the trees in Giggly Glen Forest and poured big lorry loads of concrete all over the land. The wild animals ran away and the river turned a dirty brown colour and then … the birds stopped singing, the sun stopped shining and dark clouds spread across the sky.
Mr Barley went to see what was happening and sadly shook his head when he saw the mess and destruction made by Mr McWeasel’s men.
There were ten huge turbines. Each one taller than ten big trees standing on top of one another.
The biggest turbine was Trasher – Tiny’s very distant cousin – so named because he destroyed everything around him wherever he went.
Trasher was a bully. He was the ringleader of the other turbines. They laughed and jeered at Tiny because he was so tiny and rarely worked even though he did all Mr Barley wanted.
Mr McWeasel went to see Tiny. “You are too small. You don’t earn any money. I will order some parts and make you bigger and you will work harder for me.”
But then something else happened that really upset Tiny. His friends the birds were being hit by the blades of the big turbines. He told Mr McWeasel that he didn’t want to get any bigger and if he made him then he would refuse to work. He would go on strike and his blades would never move. He would not harm the birds.
Mr McWeasel was furious and ordered Tiny off Sir Snatchit’s land. “No-one disobeys me,” he said. Tiny looked to the other turbines for help but they just all stood and laughed at him.
“Go away,” shouted Trasher. “There is no place for someone like you here. You are not even big enough to boil a kettle! We need to earn money for Sir Snatchit and Mr McWeasel and if the birds get in the way then that is their hard luck.”
So Tiny left and was found by Ally, sitting crying on one of the trees cut down by Mr McWeasel’s men.
He listened to Tiny’s sadness about the birds and having to leave his home on the cowshed roof, just like Tiny had listened to him so many times when he had been sad.
Then he told Tiny what was happening to his family because of the turbines. He told him how his mother and father couldn’t sleep because of all the noise from Trasher and his friends. His father had crashed his tractor into the hen house the other day when he was so tired and had fallen asleep at the wheel.
Ally said he couldn’t sleep either and sometimes felt scared when he heard the thumping and swooshing of the turbine blades in the night.
It felt like the whole house was vibrating. The only time they got any peace from the awful noise was when the wind wasn’t blowing and the monster turbines weren’t turning. His mother often complained of headaches and never smiled any more. The chickens had stopped laying their eggs since the turbines came. Ross the sheep dog had starting hiding in the barn and wouldn’t come out and work the sheep.
Tiny jumped up! “This is not right,” he said. “We must stop it. Let’s go to the village and tell the people what is happening here.”
The village hall was crowded. People were shouting and angry.
“I can’t sleep and my visitors can’t sleep and now they won’t come back. How can I earn any money?” said Mrs Bumbly from Giggly Glen’s Guest House.
“My children can’t do their homework with that terrible din going on,” said Mr MacMillan from the bakery.
“The pupils can’t concentrate on their lessons any more with the never-ending noise,” said the Headmaster of the local school, Mr Knowall.
“My wife feels poorly all the time now. She says she has buzzing in her ears that never stops – not even when the turbines do,” said PC Doyle.
“I saw some bits break off one of the turbines – they flew a long way. They nearly hit me,” said Stan the Handyman.
“What if they caught fire?” asked the Fire Chief. “We couldn’t put a fire out so high up in the air.”
“My cat has left home and I have terrible headaches and feel ill every day,” said Mrs Miggins from the Post Office.
“I would sell my home and move away from Giggly Glen and those horrible turbines, but nobody will buy my house,” said Mr Donald.
“I saw the helicopter from the coastguard fly too close to the turbines when it was misty. There could be a nasty accident,” said Mr Foggarty.
“Enough is enough,” shouted Mr Barley. “We cannot live like this!
Mr McWeasel and his monsters cannot be allowed to ruin our lives and make us sick. Let’s send them away from Giggly Glen.”
“But how?” cried the villagers. “They are so big and frightening and dangerous for us to be near.”
Tiny turned to Ally and said, “Take the villagers to the turbines and I will meet you there.”
And so all the villagers, led by the now brave and confident Ally, marched up to Sir Snatchit’s land where they were met by Mr McWeasel standing in front of Trasher and the other turbines.
“We are here to tell you to go. You are making us ill. Living in Giggly Glen has become a nightmare since you arrived,” Ally shouted up to them.
“So what?” snarled Mr McWeasel. “What are you going to do about it, little boy?”
Trasher and the other turbines sneered and laughed at him.
The villagers were scared but then Ally pointed to the lane and yelled, “Look who’s with Tiny.”
There was Tiny sitting on top of his dear old friend Tuska the retired tank, chugging towards the turbines.
That was enough for Mr McWeasel. “Pack up lads we are off; we hated Giggly Glen anyway; not enough wind and not enough money.”
With that, Mr McWeasel, Trasher and his terrible friends were seen running off into the distance and as they did the clouds parted, the sun shone, the birds started singing and the deer and the rabbits came back. The hens started clucking as they looked for somewhere to lay their eggs and Ross the sheep dog came out from the barn wagging his tail.
Tiny looked around, smiled at all the happy villagers, winked at his little friend Ally and went back to the cowshed roof where he settled down for an afternoon snooze in the sunshine.
Peace and happiness had returned to Giggly Glen.
Written by Lyndsey Ward, with Cartoons by Josh
Download original document: “Tiny the Turbine”
Tiny the Turbine is available as a PDF to download and you may print for personal use or email as you wish and, if you like what we have done or wish to use it in your own campaigning, please make a donation on Josh’s website www.cartoonsbyjosh.co.uk/tiny-the-turbine to help fund this and possible future projects. All contributions, large or small, are gratefully accepted and appreciated.
If you would like to buy a printed copy please contact Josh via his website – www.cartoonsbyjosh.co.uk.
For any commercial resale or reuse please email Lyndsey Ward – subsidy.sam@btinternet.com.
See also: Subsidy Sam the Turbine
Subsidy Sam: a tale about money, greed … and wind turbines
Author: Ward, Lyndsey
Subsidy Sam was big, one of the biggest turbines you could get.
He had spent the last year, since being built, dominating the village and bearing down on the local school, its pupils and staff. Sometimes you could even see him flailing his arms about but a lot of the time he didn’t. He was huge. So big he could be seen for miles and miles. Much further than the land owner, Lord Grabbit, a filthy rich coal mining baron, had said you would be able to. He, with the developers Green Scam Renewables, had even shown pictures to the worried villagers of what Subsidy Sam would look like but it was really hard to see him in the misty distance in the developer’s photomontages.
But today Subsidy Sam was furious. One of his arms had blown off and jagged bits of it were spread all over the school playground. It was so windy. Perhaps even a Force 9 gale. Sam had been waiting for Green Scam Renewables to switch him off before he disintegrated but they had been waiting for the National Grid to ask them to switch him off first, so that they could claim the extravagant constraint payments to not generate.
Green Scam Renewables had misjudged it today and now Subsidy Sam stood broken with one arm missing and the other two hanging forlornly at his side.
It was a good job it wasn’t break time when the children would have been outside playing. With no enforced safety zone around this huge piece of industrial machinery and its whirling blades, it was very dangerous to be anywhere near him but no-one was telling the children that. Subsidy Sam was their friend and would help save the world. The nice wind developer man who owned Green Scam Renewables, Mr McWeasel, had told them that. He had come to the school with the jolly round man from the government who was wearing a tie with turbines all over it. They told the children that Subsidy Sam would save them and had frightened them all into thinking without him they were all doomed and the planet would die and so would they.
It was scary stuff. It gave them nightmares.
Thank goodness for Subsidy Sam.
The French Head Mistress, Madame de Gaulle, was pleased to see Sam’s blade fly pass her study window at such speed and smash into a thousand pieces. She was relieved that none of the children had been hurt but she was glad to see the broken turbine. ‘Good riddance’ she thought. She knew a waste of money when she saw it. She hated Subsidy Sam, or SS as she preferred to call him, and had put up strong resistance to him being built but to no avail. It made no difference that she objected when they pretended Sam was a community turbine. No-one in the community wanted Sam but deceiving the local authority into thinking he was one was the only way they would be allowed to build him. She’d heard of burly men going round the village telling people not to object or else.
People were frightened so they didn’t.
Now when the sun shone she had to close the blinds in her study to stop the strobing from Sam’s blades hitting her desk and giving her throbbing headaches.
The compensation that was offered to the community by Green Scam Renewables was offensive. How can they pay anyone enough to make up for not being able to sleep at nights because of the incessant thumping when Sam was having a party and waving his arms in the air?
Nothing could make up for that.
Even the people who want to sell up and move away can’t because when the potential buyers see Subsidy Sam they don’t even get out of their cars. They just speed away without a backward glance.
The tourists have stopped coming. They see Sam and ask, ‘Why did you build that huge ugly thing near your pretty village? We won’t stay here. We will spend our money in places we like the look of and that’s not here.’
Once the foreign workers who built Subsidy Sam had left, the B&Bs and guest houses stayed empty, many people lost their jobs in the tourism industry because no-one came to visit any more.
The birds were happy to see Subsidy Sam immobilised because it meant they no longer had to take their lives in their wings to feed at the nature class bird table every time they passed him when he was having one of his Edward Scissorhands on acid moments.
The caretaker was pleased because he wouldn’t have to keep sweeping up all their feathers and body bits when they misjudged it. However, all the oil that was leaking down Subsidy Sam’s leg and seeping across the playground was hard to scrub off.
The caretaker could never understand how a wind turbine so full of fossil fuels could ever be classed as clean and green.
Still, the oil was a greenish black colour – perhaps that is what people meant. He was just a simple caretaker on minimum wage struggling to pay his energy bill with all these ‘green’ levies on them. What did he know?
He had wanted to object to Subsidy Sam being built but he lived in a cottage on Lord Grabbit’s estate. It had been suggested to him that he shouldn’t object in case his home became no longer available to rent. Without his little cottage he wouldn’t have anywhere to live near where he worked, so he didn’t object.
Mr McWeasel wasn’t pleased because since Subsidy Sam’s arm had been liberated he was unable to get the juicy subsidy for any energy the turbine might have managed to produce or the very lucrative constraint payments. He got those when he was told to switch Subsidy Sam off when there was low demand for electricity, too much wind and the grid was in danger of being overloaded and plunging everyone into darkness.
Why should he care that Subsidy Sam was intermittent and unreliable and didn’t give any energy security? He got paid whatever.
Mrs McWeasel wouldn’t be pleased either as she was expecting her usual two months holiday in the Bahamas, new top of the range set of wheels and that stunning diamond necklace she had set her heart on.
Mr McWeasel would have a lot of explaining to do when he got home. After all he had guaranteed his lovely young wife a life of riches and leisure all paid for by the spoils from Subsidy Sam. It was no matter to him that fuel poverty had increased because the supplements to pay Sam’s subsidies had been added to the energy bills of everyone, even the poor, the elderly and the sick.
No matter to him either that the children and staff were in danger every day from Subsidy Sam’s flying components, that the birds were being sliced and diced, the bats were exploding, the leaking oil was polluting the school yard or that the lights were frequently going out so that the caretaker had to crank up the polluting diesel generator. None of that concerned Mr McWeasel or the politicians he had hoodwinked into believing his windy propaganda. They were so stupid even Mr McWeasel couldn’t believe he had got away with the wind con for so long.
Still, that looked like it had all come to an untimely end with Subsidy Sam now broken and useless. No more subsidies available for new Sams because that pesky government over the border had stopped filling the subsidy trough.
‘Ah well,’ sighed Mr McWeasel. It was time to move onto other things. He had heard that there were good returns and subsidies operating banks of noisy toxic fume-belching diesel generators now. All needed because the politicians had over-deployed on the weather-dependent subsidy suckers and under-deployed on reliable generation. He would need to speak to Lord Grabbit and see if he could build them where Sam was, near the school.
Mrs McWeasel would still get her holiday, her new car and her diamonds. Mr McWeasel might even treat himself to that yacht he had always wanted as well.
Saving the planet was no longer a priority – was it ever, Mr McWeasel?
Words by Lyndsey Ward, with Cartoons by Josh
Download original document: “Subsidy Sam the Turbine”
See also: Tiny the Turbine
