October 24, 2007
Ontario
Ontario
[This item has been updated. Click here for the full story]
Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh Council seems to be stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to settling on a minimum setback distance for wind turbines, and has deferred the matter until mid November when a final decision is expected.
At the Oct. 16 meeting, Councillors Barry Millian and Carl Sloetjes presented a verbal report of the noise expert draft findings at the MOE focus group session in Toronto Oct. 15. The pair attended the meeting on behalf of the Township of ACW.
“I’ll get right to the bottom line here – which was the last chapter of the meeting, and that was, where do we go from here?” said Counc. Millian. “My bottom line is that I need to be put in a comfort zone before I move on this issue, and walking out of that meeting, that didn’t happen.”
The nearly five hour session focused on the draft findings of Dr. Ramani Ramakrishnan, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto whose areas of specialty include acoustical modeling, noise control, architectural acoustics and aero-acoustics. He was commissioned by the MOE to study and report on the findings of G.P. Van den Berg, a physicist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Van den Berg studied and attempted to explain why modern onshore wind turbines can cause noise problems for residents at distances of a mile or more.
For his 2004 article, “Effects of the wind profile at night on wind turbine sound published in the Journal of Sound and Vibration, Van den Berg measured sound around the Rhede wind farm, an installation of 17 wind turbines, on the Dutch/ German border.
“The gentleman who spoke at the session (Dr. Ramakrishnan) studied the Van den Berg report and had some critical things to say,” said Millian. “He did not agree with the way Van den Berg completed some of his studies. He said that some conclusions reached were missing the documentation on how he arrived there. He didn’t say [Van den Berg] was right or wrong– he just said that the documentation explaining some results was missing.”
See this week’s Lucknow Sentinel for the full story.
By Dominique Milburn
24 October 2007
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/10/24/final-decision-on-turbine-setbacks-may-soon-be-made/