“A Natural Experiment”

—Gail Mair (Italy)

The radio is on full blast and I’m fiddling around in the kitchen with no real purpose except the purpose of keeping myself busy.  I glance out the window.  Between the vanilla-scented leaves of the fig tree I can just make out Mark’s wheelbarrow, but the man himself has disappeared.  I consider going out to look for him but that would mean stepping over the threshold and the skin on my arms recoils at the thought, pulling the hair up, hedgehog style.

It’s a glorious summer day, the stuff holiday brochures are packed full of, but here I am—hesitating.  I give myself a mental kick, pick up the camera and go outside.

Today isn’t quite so bad, and I can still hear the radio blaring away from inside the house.  I’ll go and listen to the bees, maybe take a few pictures; that will calm the jitters I haven’t been able to shake off—a feeling of ants scurrying around just beneath my skin.

I concentrate hard: all the country sights and sounds—birds, insects, lizards—are just as they’ve always been.  And yet there is the other thing, too.  I ignore it.  A shovelfull of dirt flies out of the hillside and into the wheelbarrow—plunk.

Mark is nowhere to be seen.  I take another step forward.   Plunk, a second shower of earth and stones.  Plunk, a third.  Another step and I see him, intent on the back wall of his hole in the hill—his soundproof hideaway, his refuge, his defiance of a law that prohibits mechanical removal of soil without a permit: plunk!

He pauses.  I click.  He turns towards me for a moment and then turns away again, watching the small landslides crumbling into the crater with a soft rumbling swish.

Full wheelbarrow—click.  The dark base of the cave with its glint of water—click.  I have the series here on the table as I write.  My husband’s hair is brown with dust; it makes him seem younger but for the look in his eyes.

I walk past, up the trampled path to the bees and sit down.  The sun’s warmth radiates off the hives, but a core coldness lingers.  I take a deep breath, hoping the familiar scent will do its healing work as I lean my head on the side of the hive and listen to the soothing hum.

Two thin streaks make their way down my cheeks; I can no longer shut out the turbines’ incessant whine.

»»»»

The drone inside the house has not stopped for three days.  Low and insidious.  It’s worse at night.  There is no escape.  It takes me when and where it wants, hour after hour, day after day, sometimes week after week leaving me weak with depression.

It’s bedtime.  Mark’s eyes are on me.  How can he not know what I’m feeling after all our years together?  How can I not know he’s watching me?  We circle round each other in a protective dance.  My fingers hover over the switch of the CD player and then draw back.  Magou’s magic cannot save me.  I’m exhausted but I dare not go to bed.  I dread the moment the music stops and I step off the roundabout, reeling, nauseous—but on or off, I can’t trick my body with a musical box.

I’m bolt upright in bed and soaking wet.  I hear my own screams echo in the dark.  My heart pounds wildly. There is nothing tangible to fight and nowhere to run.  Mark’s arms are round me, gently restraining.  His heartbeat calms my own and his hands stroke my hair.  He whispers reassuring words but his face is wet: I am not a child.  He knows.  We both know.

»»»»

The dirty-looking green and white paint is chipped where the hospital beds take the bends too fast and in any other places where they manage to make contact with the walls.  (No reason the drivers should change their driving habits at work, I suppose.)  The waiting room is in the drafty corridor—three battered plastic chairs. I’m perched uncomfortably on one of them alongside a shrivelled up mummy and a zombie.  I wonder what kind of monster I am, but the other two don’t look at me or seem to recognise me as one of their species.

The zombie’s eyes are open, vacant.  The mummy’s are closed.  The mummy is stiff with papery skin and will have to be prised off the seat before it can lumber into the doctor’s surgery.  The zombie is somewhere else.  What can a doctor possibly do for either?

Signora Alderly?

That’s me.  I still can’t get used to hearing my maiden name after 30 years of marriage—just one more thing to resent in this god-forsaken hole.  I’m led into an office and left there.

The doctor will be with you in a minute.

I very much doubt that; I just saw him light up on the balcony at the far end of the corridor.

I’m sitting with my back to the door—really bad fang shui.  I can feel the tension in the skin of my back.  I shift position and take in the glass-fronted cabinets with files, tattered and dusty with age.  There’s a crack in the window and a blue bottle buzzing around irritatingly.  Even the spiders don’t seem particularly interested in their jobs.

The door opens. I swivel round to the desk, scraping the floor with the aluminium chair legs.  I can smell the stale smoke.  The doctor sits down, plonks a bag on the desk and extracts a folder of exactly the same dingy shade as the files in the cabinet.  Someone must have ordered a bulk delivery half a century ago.  He’s intent on something in the folder.  A piece of paper appears and a pen.

Sophie Alderly?

He finally looks up.  I’m not one hundred percent certain that he can see me—maybe I’m a ghost—but he seems solid enough.

“Yes!”  The room absorbs my voice.  Strange.

The doctor has the same desiccated look as the mummy outside.  I’m having a nightmare again but it feels real.  I wonder how old he is.  Fifty, sixty or five hundred?

What brings you here?

I deliver my story; he scratches away on the sheet of paper.   I don’t know what he takes down but I get the feeling the file will vanish into thin air the moment I leave the office.  The fly starts buzzing around again.  He seems to be listening now because he’s put his pen down.  I want him to record everything, everything—but the folder will disappear anyway, so what’s the point?

I can give you some mood elevators, I hear him say.

A chemical brightener to make my washing look white even if it’s grey?

“But that won’t change the situation!”

He’s irritated: It won’t cost you anything.

A lightning bolt hits me: the patients in the waiting room, the situation—he thinks I’m here for a free soma holiday. The truth is too ugly to contemplate.  I decline politely.  He’s baffled.

What do you want of me, then?

I tell him clearly what I want, without stuttering.  (That surprises me.)  I want a doctor’s certificate to say I was here and why I was here.  I can see the disbelief on his face, feel him floundering.  He’s in deep water.  I enjoy his discomfort.

It won’t prove anything, he says.

I know that—but it’s what I want.

I want the doctor to write that I came to see him because the wind turbines are making me ill and I want him to sign it.  Those responsible for building the wind farm have forced themselves upon me, taken control of my life and home, invaded my waking thoughts and my dreams but I am going to force one member of the establishment, at least, to submit to my will.  He resists.

“Write it.  Please.”

He scrawls something on a piece of paper—both sides—and signs.  He reads it out to me:  just the slippery wishy-washy nothingness I’d expected, but I’m conscious of a surge of power.  I’m back in the land of the living.

I put the grubby blue envelope into my rucksack, get up, scrape back the chair.  The sitting is at an end.

He looks up and smiles brightly.  I would suggest a follow-up sitting in a month.  You can make an appointment at reception.  Think about the tablets.  Goodbye.

.
Editor’s note:  Unfortunately, this is not fiction; all this happened to the author.  This website exists for the Gail Atkinson-Mairs of the world.

I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,
You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,
On his right cheek I put the family kiss,
And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.

To anyone dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door,
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
Let the physician and the priest go home.

I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,
O despairer, here is my neck,
By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.

—Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass” (1855)

I love a sun burnt country

I love its sweeping plains

I can tolerate our years of droughts and our destructive flooding rains

But I hate the sight of wind farms that in our rural lands abound

I hate their jerking twitching arms and their swishing hissing sound

I hate the way they blight our view of our once proud fertile soil

I hate their ghastly ghostly hue

Where farmers used to toil

I hate the endless sleepless nights

And the headaches that they bring

I hate the ugly metal sites which used to bloom in spring

Instead of trees and fields and flowers and clear blue open sky

We see slicing blades and tall white towers where eagles used to fly

So take these monstrous things somewhere and build them faraway

Where our deserts have more room to share

And the wind blows every day

Editor’s note:  This was send to us by Sue Kennedy, Australia, with the following note.

The original poem by Dorothea McKellor was first published in London in September 1908.  Over a hundred years later her great-nephew wrote these new words to this very moving poem.

It makes me cry every time I read to it. Many thanks for all your updates; we look forward to getting them as we are fighting a proposed wind farm directly across the road from our place. In fact, we will be closer to the substation than the host farmer’s own place. We will be looking onto it from our “entertainment area”! How good is that?”

Sue Kennedy

Finally, a Board of Health does its job!

Editor’s note:  The Brown County (Wisconsin) Board of Health has issued the following formal request to the State of Wisconsin.

We have been told that the Brown County Human Services Committee (which oversees the County Board of Health) passed the same resolution, though with somewhat more explicit and tougher language. Both the Human Services Committee and Board of Health passed this resolution unanimously.

We urge you to contact Judy Friederichs, RN, BSN, Director of the Board of Health, and congratulate her for making history!  So far as we know, this is the first instance of this happening . . . in the world.  Let us all hope and pray that Boards of Health around the world will now have the courage to follow Brown County’s lead!  To reach Ms. Friederichs, call (920) 448-6400, fax (920) 448-6449, or click here to send her an email.  We believe you can also use this email address:  BC_Health@co.brown.wi.us.  Overwhelm this good woman with congratulations and support!

Click here for the entire document.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Brown County Board of Health formally requests temporary emergency financial relocation assistance from the State of Wisconsin for those Brown County families that are suffering adverse health effects and undue hardships caused by the irresponsible placement of industrial wind turbines around their homes and property. The State of Wisconsin emergency financial assistance is requested until the conditions that have caused these undue hardships are studied and resolved, allowing these families to once again return safely to their homes and property.”

“Not Everyone Happy With Ocean Gate Wind Turbines”

—Jason Allentoff, WOBM Radio (Ocean Gate, NJ), 3/28/12

The small community of Ocean Gate now has two wind turbines to cut electric costs through green energy. It’s taken the town several years but both are up and running—generating power. While hundreds showed up for the celebration outside town hall a few years back, not everyone is smiling.

Some of the people who did originally attend the ribbon cutting, complete with the band and state officials, are now angry over several issues that they say, is hurting their quality of life.

When Lori Ditzel moved to the borough five years ago, she and her husband felt they found their dream home. That dream has become a nightmare thanks to the turbines which have a constant scraping and swooshing sound. Ditzel’s house is approximately 200 feet from the first turbine that was erected about three years ago. The unit powers the municipal complex. The second, just put up last week is a few blocks away, is providing energy to the water treatment plant and firehouse.

COMPLAINTS FALL ON “DEAF EARS”

While Ditzel says she’s totally for green energy, she had voiced her concerns about the noise to Mayor Paul Kennedy and the council. She says that fell on “deaf ears.” Ditzel explains “this is totally unacceptable. They are constantly ignoring us at the council meetings. They are brushing us off. In fact, one councilman said to me that he used to live near a highway and it’s something to get used to. I didn’t move next to a highway! They have encroached on my property and my rights.”

THE SITUATION KEEPS GETTING WORSE

The situation has gotten progressively worse over the last year. After Ditzel and her husband Chris had the front door to their home replaced, their whole house re-sheet rocked and even put blinds up in every window, the noise and a strobing effect continues daily. The couple has a one year old who constantly wakes up in the middle of the night. Ditzel says “every time the blades stop spinning, it sounds like a car crash. It’s terrible.”

The strobing effect occurs each time the sun goes to a certain point. It lasts for about 45 minutes and can be maddening, according to Ditzel.

While most of the neighbors agree there’s no way the officials would remove the turbines, they are hoping to compromise and have them shut down at night. A study was conducted about two years ago by the Ocean County Health Department which showed the sounds coming out of the turbine were in legal decibel level standards—at least for the daytime. They are still waiting for representatives to come back for additional testing.

“GOOD LUCK” TRYING TO SELL

Now both Lori and Chris Ditzel are trying to sell their home. They approached a realtor, the same one that sold them their house originally, who pretty much replied “good luck.” They are concerned about the property values on the home and know they won’t be able to get even close to what they paid for it. Ditzel says when she brought that concern to Mayor Kennedy, he replied “no, actually it would help the value of your home.” She’s not buying it.

So far, there are nine noise complaints that have been filed and the group of residents on Ocean Gate Avenue and the surrounding streets have taken their concerns directly to the state.

Several residents contacted me about their plight. Most of their stories are the same as Lori Ditzel’s, who at this point, is stuck in a house she no longer calls a dream.

“[We] suggest the removal of the requirement to measure low frequency noise from the [New South Wales] Draft Guidelines” (Vestas letter, p. 13)

News Release from the European Platform against Windfarms (EPAW), and the North American Platform against Windpower (NA-PAW) 3/28/12

Acronyms

EPAW: European Platform Against Windfarms
NA-PAW: North American Platform Against Windpower
NSW: New South Wales
LFN: low frequency noise
ILFN: infrasound and low frequency noise

Click here for the Vestas letter

In a submission to the new Draft Guidelines for wind farms by the government of New South Wales (Australia), world-leading wind turbine manufacturer Vestas asked to drop the requirement for measuring emissions of low frequency noise (LFN), despite scientific studies indicating that they have adverse effects on the health of neighbors.

The following is a screenshot from Vestas’s letter:

Vestas’s request flies in the face of a new Danish policy, announced March 26th, aiming at improving the ethics of exporting companies, e.g., on human rights.  Denmark’s Wind Turbine regulations recognise that LFN can be a health problem.

The draft windfarm guidelines proposed by concerned officials in NSW require that LFN emitted by wind turbines be measured.  But in a letter to them dated March 14th, Vestas Australian Wind Technology Ltd, a subsidiary of Danish multinational Vestas, “suggests the removal of the requirement to measure low frequency noise from the Draft Guidelines” (p. 13).

Actually, they go so far as to urge the removal of the entire health section.  “Ideally, the entirety of Section 1.3 (e) should be deleted” (p. 7).

The letter’s author, Mr McAlpine, admits that “existing and well validated industry standard models for acoustic propagation are NOT designed to deal with frequencies at the low end of the audible spectrum . . .” (p. 13).

For the Waubra Foundation, this is a smoking gun.  “To date, infrasound and LFN (ILFN) have been ignored altogether, and Vestas obviously wants to keep the issue buried.”

Dr Sarah Laurie, the Foundation’s CEO, explains:  “Why is Vestas suggesting to remove the requirement to measure low frequency noise, when there is evidence that wind turbines emit ILFN which correlate with people’s serious health problems,^1,2 and that larger turbines emit even more at these frequencies?³  Why is this technology being imposed upon the global community while ignoring the health effects of long term exposure to ILFN emitted by these machines?”

Adding, “Vestas claim their turbines are safe, but where is the data that proves it?  There is none!  Yet, all the actual clinical data collected by physicians and reported by windfarm neighbours shows that there are very serious impacts on health, which worsen over time.”⁴

Sarah Laurie, MD

Dr Laurie further points out that, at a windfarm in Waterloo, South Australia, consisting of 37 x 3MW Vestas wind turbines, a study last year revealed 70% of the population living within 5km reported being “negatively affected” by the noise.⁵

The Waubra Foundation has been contacted by residents living up to 5km away from wind farms who have had to leave their homes because of growing health problems. “Residents at Waterloo living out to 10km report awakening in the middle of the night ‘in a panicked state,’ a symptom experienced by many windfarm neighbours worldwide, apparently linked to inaudible noise, ear pressure, and body vibrations related to wind turbine exposure.”

Vestas is trying to cover up other impacts as well, notes Mark Duchamp of EPAW. “Their letter proposes to eliminate the NSW 2 km setback, as well as compensation for losses in property values, and the entire section on blade throw.”

Public health and well-being are in serious danger when industrial lobbies impose their terms on elected officials, comments Sherri Lange, of NA-PAW.  “Much the same is happening in North America, where the health issue has been pushed under the carpet.  This will cost taxpayers dearly, for ultimately they will have to pay for all the damage done.  Criminal charges may even be laid against policy-makers, for knowingly causing harm to health and life.”

Contact

Dr Sarah Laurie + 61 439 865 914 (Australia)
CEO, Waubra Foundation
sarah@waubrafoundation.com.au

Mark Duchamp +34 693 643 736 (Spain) Skype: mark.duchamp
Executive Director, EPAW
www.epaw.org
save.the.eagles@gmail.com

Sherri Lange +1 416 567 5115 (Canada)
CEO, NA-PAW
www.na-paw.org
kodaisl@rogers.com

References

1.  Stephen Ambrose and Robert Rand “The Bruce McPherson Infrasound and Low Frequency Noise Study” Falmouth, Mass., December 2011.

2.  Steven Cooper “Review of Draft NSW guidelines.”

3.  Møller & Pedersen, internationally-ranked acousticians from the University of Aarlborg “Low Frequency Noise from Large Turbines” J Acoustical Society America 2011 129:3727-3744.

4.  Physicians include Dr Amanda Harry (UK 2003), Dr David Iser (Australia 2004) , Dr Nina Pierpont (USA 2006 & 2009), Professor Robert McMurtry (Canada 2010), Dr Michael Nissenbaum (USA 2010), Dr Sarah Laurie (Australia 2011).  Documents are available for download from the following websites: www.windturbinesyndrome.com, www.windvigilance.com, www.waubrafoundation.com.au, and www.wind-watch.org

5.  Zhenhua Wang, “Evaluation of Wind Farm Noise Policies in South Australia:  A Case Study of Waterloo Wind Farm,” MA thesis, Dept. of Geography, Environment and Population, University of Adelaide (Australia), 2011.

Domestic animals hammered by wind turbines

—Andreas Marciniak

I used to have chickens, a peacock, and a peahen.  Right after 37 wind turbines came online in Waterloo, South Australia—first thing, one after the other, my chickens stopped laying eggs, and my peahen refused to remain with the peacock.

One day the peahen took off and never came back.  After a few weeks I went and got another peahen, and all the peahen & peacock would do is fight.  She, too, kept taking off.

So, after my brother was forced by Wind Turbine Syndrome out of his home, and went to stay on a small property 25 km from the turbines, I took all my domestic fowl (chickens, peacock & peahen) to him, we built a new home for them, and the chickens started laying eggs within a week, and the peacock and peahen have been inseparable.

There’s one other thing I would like to share about the chickens:  of the few eggs I did get, most had NO yolk and the shells were like jelly.  My neighbor across the street had the same problems with his chickens.

Wind turbines have also affected my brother’s 2 dogs, a Jack Russel and a mixed breed.  The first thing we noticed about his dogs is that they didn’t want to go outside, as they did before the turbines came online.  When they did venture outside, they wouldn’t listen when you called; they just kept wandering on and on.

The other weird thing we noticed is that one of his dogs would try to squeeze itself between the lounge cushions to sleep, and the other dog would climb under the bed in the corner.  Or they would sit for hours, staring at the wall.

After my brother and his dogs moved away from the turbines, all this strange behavior stopped.

Editor’s note:  Click here to listen to a CBC Radio (Canada) report on Ontario’s bungling approach to Wind Turbine Syndrome.  (Was it “bungling” or “criminal”?)

At the center of the report is Barbara Ashbee, whose family was driven from their home by WTS, and had their home bought by the wind company, which compelled her to sign a gag agreement.  Ashbee, God bless her, broke that gag agreement!

—Tracy Whitworth, Clear Creek, Ontario

I have a large pond approximately 450 meters from the closest wind turbine. I had stocked my pond with Koi fish and bullfrog tadpoles. Over the years, the fish and frog population grew.

Once the turbines came online, the fish and frogs died off.

The biggest and the oldest ones went first. I would find them dead, floating in the pond.

Just another one of those things I miss from my, now abandoned, home.

The “Invisible Children” Meet Wind Turbines

Editor’s note:  The following is a news release from the North American Platform against Windpower (NA-PAW).

.
In a bid to give a voice to the thousands of people who suffer in their health from the vicinity to wind turbines, the North American Platform Against Wind Power (NA-PAW) presents to the public twelve-year-old Jordynn Stom, whose already delicate health is being threatened by a wind farm project.

Jordy will no longer be able to enjoy a normal family life on her parent’s ranch in Kern County, California, where plans are afoot for the construction of an array of wind machines in the vicinity. She is one of the many American children who suffer from disabilities. Her immune system is deficient, and she has Systemic Lupus and Photo-Sensitive Epilepsy. Last Christmas, she had a seizure when camera flashes bombarded Santa at a public event.

So concerned is Jordy, that she has volunteered to become the “NA-PAW’s ambassador of goodwill,” says Sherri Lange, chief executive officer of NA-PAW. “Jordy has good communication skills, and will be travelling around North America delivering speeches, reaching out to other disabled children threatened by wind farms, and to their families.”

Click here to read the remainder.
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Sherri Lange, President NA-PAW

Editor’s note:  We honor birds & bats slaughtered by industrial wind turbines.  We honor sea-life driven mad by turbine infrasound.  We honor domestic animals (horses, cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, alpacas, etc.) that have delivered malformed fetuses–or were unable to conceive–or refused to nurse, or were otherwise tormented to distraction (and sometimes, to death) by industrial wind turbines.

Click anywhere on the image, below, to visit this Wall of Pain.

“Moon rose beyond the hill”

Moon rose just beyond the hill,
spilled ice on trembling dale
and shadow flicker wandered. Still

burned each vacant Cyclops eye, till
voice cried “Lord of Winds, Hail!”
as moon rose beyond the hill.

“Gold, fear, madness now will
fill our Holy Grail,”
while shadow flicker wandered. Still

human victims wait, hearts thrill
in time to whirling blades. Pale
moon rose. Far beyond the hill

men writhe and sweat, dreams chill
in dead landscape where trail
and shadow flicker wander still.

Awake true Lord of Winds and kill
those who harness you, or fail.
Moon rose just beyond the hill
and shadow flicker wanders still.

—Gail Mair (Italy)

“Mr. McCann has confirmed a 25-40 percent reduction is to be expected within two miles and that smaller reductions over a larger area should also be anticipated.”

The approval of wind energy projects within close proximity to occupied homes is tantamount to an inverse condemnation, or regulatory taking of private property rights, as the noise and impacts are in some respects a physical invasion, an easement in gross over neighboring properties, and the direct impacts reduce property values and the rights of nearby neighbors.”

Michael S. McCann, CRA
McCann Appraisal, LLC
Chicago, IL

Editor’s note:  We honor those who have experienced a 25-40 percent loss of property value from wind turbines sited nearby.  We also honor those who got zero cash for their “inversely condemned” homes, which they had to abandon owing to the physical invasion of infrasound and shadow flicker.  And, lastly, we honor those who were bought out by wind developers and then forced to sign a gag agreement, never to discuss the terms of this “regulatory taking” of their land and home.

Click anywhere, below, to read articles about this Wall of Pain.

Editor’s note:  Big Wind scoffs at the people suffering devastating health effects from wind turbines.  Big Wind claims those who “allegedly” suffer are few.

We have created a memorial—a Wall of Pain—of hundreds of sufferers.  As you read, bear in mind that many of these narratives are about entire families, or even communities, thus multiplying the hundreds into even more hundreds.

So far, we have collected 209 stories—a fraction of what is undoubtedly out there.  We will continue to collect stories, even though it’s redundant, since they all use the same language, the same terms, to describe the disease that Big Wind and its government enablers say doesn’t exist.

Click anywhere, below, to begin reading the Wall of Pain.

The approval of wind energy projects within close proximity to occupied homes is tantamount to an inverse condemnation, or regulatory taking of private property rights, as the noise and impacts are in some respects a physical invasion, an easement in gross over neighboring properties, and the direct impacts reduce property values and the rights of nearby neighbors.”

Michael S. McCann, CRA
McCann Appraisal, LLC
Chicago, IL

“Mr. McCann has confirmed a 25-40 percent reduction is to be expected within two miles and that smaller reductions over a larger area should also be anticipated.”

“Based on her experience in Falmouth, MA, Mrs. Cool says, ‘I know that the installation of industrial wind turbines is a Negative Material Fact.'”

Annie Hart Cool
Annie Hart Cool Team
Sotheby’s International Realty

—Walter Cudnohufsky, Shelburne Falls Independent (3/22/12)

The proposal to install wind turbines on Mt. Massaemet (Mass.) has already dramatically lowered all property values in the 11 square miles of Shelburne (MA) and Buckland (MA) lying within the most impacted two miles of the turbines. The turbines already cast a shadow on the title and expected benefits to residential property.

Chicago real estate appraiser Michael McCann, who spoke in Shelburne Falls recently at the invitation of the Friends of Mt. Massaemet advocacy group, suggests that industrial wind installations can be tantamount to “inverse condemnation,” or a regulatory and private taking of others’ private property rights.

At his March 3 presentation, Mr. McCann suggested that, given his well documented and conservative estimate of 25 percent value decline, an impressive $45 million tax base depreciation would be anticipated in Shelburne alone. Buckland would certainly have a significant tax base impact as well. The depreciation has, in his studies, reached 40 percent. McCann has conducted 20 recent industrial turbine-related evaluations, zoning compliance and impact studies across the country.

It may take two to three years for the Shelburne/Buckland marketplace to reflect this now-surmised devaluation of real estate. When the affected property values are lowered by demand, every property in the Shelburne and Buckland communities will then need to share higher property taxes to compensate for the inevitable tax-base shortfall.

The reality is that Governor Patrick’s 2020 renewable energy goal, whether intentional or not, is equivalent to taking private property in every ridgeline community in western Massachusetts with no planned compensation for property owners.

Economic impacts are common sense

Common sense should tell us that 400-500-foot-tall industrial wind turbines on the tops of New England ridges will have impacts. Machines so out of scale with surrounding landscape and visible over hundreds of square miles will diminish the natural beauty of our hills and the tourism industry that depends on them. The concern for now well-documented and widespread noise and related health effects is common knowledge to any discerning person seeking to purchase land here. This one-two punch for health and view impacts adds up to reduced interest in property purchase and reduced values.

Mr. McCann says, “The approval of wind energy projects within close proximity to occupied homes is tantamount to an inverse condemnation, or regulatory taking, of private property rights, as the noise and impacts are in some respects a physical invasion, an easement in gross over neighboring properties, and the direct impacts reduce property values and the rights of nearby neighbors.”

Perhaps this is the more potent measure of turbine impact? There has been an inevitable devaluing of more than 2,000 Shelburne and Buckland residential, business and civic properties within two miles of the proposed turbines. For most of us, this is an irreplaceable retirement nest egg.

This property value impact has a name

Annie Hart Cool, a Sotheby’s realtor, lives a half mile from the Falmouth turbine and has been affected in many ways, experiencing health impacts from low-frequency noise generated by turbines, restricted use of her property, a drop in business and a recently reduced property value appraisal.. She spoke in Shelburne on Jan. 28, 2012.

She calls it “an insult to homeowners’ intelligence and to their financial health to even begin the story that turbines won’t affect a buyer’s desire to buy in a neighborhood.”

As a realtor, Mrs. Cool is bound by a code of ethics that obliges her to reveal “Negative Material Facts” or “Material Adverse Effects” pertaining to the properties she deals with.

“These terms, used in accounting, finance, mortgage banking, thus real estate, represent a severe decline in profitability and/or the possibility that a company’s (or person’s) financial position may be seriously compromised. Any purchaser has several years to seek legal redress for unreported or misreported factors affecting the property’s value.”

Based on her experience in Falmouth, Mrs. Cool says, “I know installation of industrial wind turbines is a Negative Material Fact.”

An example of what we can expect in Shelburne and Buckland

Eight unsold homes exist in Mrs. Cool’s immediate two-block Falmouth neighborhood. Five hundred forty-nine ocean-oriented properties — a combined $2 billion in value — lie within one-half mile of the turbines. Despite their delight with the neighborhood, the setting and the wonderful homes, Mrs. Cool reports potential buyers are walking away from purchases. They note the risk of the turbine impacts as their prime reason.

As some have said, it is not whether turbines will reduce property values but rather by how much. Mr. McCann has confirmed a 25-40 percent reduction is to be expected within two miles and that smaller reductions over a larger area should also be anticipated. Using the more modest 25 percent devaluation, the Falmouth Turbines have created a $500 million decrease in tax base. Using the larger 40 percent estimate, this total rises to an $800 million devaluation, within just the one-half mile.

Accounting for the two-mile zone of impact, the reduction in tax base for Falmouth is likely reach into the low billions in a town with a total property value of $11 billion. The resulting decline in tax revenue must be made up by raising taxes for all Falmouth property owners — a process that has already begun.

Don’t expect wind energy companies to compensate for any loss, as this example from Hammond, New York shows. In December 2010, an article by reporter Matt McAllister in The Ogdensburg (NY) Journal stated, “If Hammond adopts a wind law that requires Iberdrola Renewables, Inc. to compensate property owners who see drops in their land values, the company says it will scrap plans to build a proposed wind farm.”

If there is no fiscal impact, as Iberdrola has claimed, it should be an easily justifiable business expense to bond that proclaimed fact. Florida Power & Light subsidiary, NextEra, made the same claim in DeKalb, Illinois, but relented when the Hearing Officer recommended denial of their project without such a guarantee. The guarantee was then agreed and the project was approved.

Some wind power companies have strategically used the buyout or noise easement purchases to silence nearby property owners when it was demanded and became essential. Easements in Gross are easements where the benefits accrue to the ownership (developers) but not a particular property. The wind developers understandably have no intention, as the above example illustrates, to purchase such easements over the two-mile and beyond impact zone.

To conclude

It is not then a question of whether or when Shelburne and Buckland properties will be devalued. The reality is that property devaluation has already taken place by the “negative material fact” that a publicly registered application to construct such a wind turbine complex on Mt. Massaemet exists.

This was accompanied by the public assertion by Mr. Field that “plenty of wind capacity exists on Massaemet.” The possibility is now common knowledge, and is irreversible. It is irreversible even if this current proposal were formally withdrawn by the developer or even if it were denied by the town. The on-going intent and possibility exists as a permanent, not removable, property value devaluation.

In a Letter to the Editor of the Shelburne Falls & West County Independent of Nov. 11, 2011, Vicki Citron of Newton, MA described her decision not to purchase land in Shelburne two miles down-slope of the then-proposed turbines: “We don’t want to live near this industrial site with the health hazards and lowering of property values associated with it. . . . I urge you to carefully consider the impact of this wind development on the economic health of Shelburne. Others interested in living in Shelburne, like us, may choose to live elsewhere.”

A single remedy exists to reinstate the affected property values: Ban industrial-scale wind turbines in Shelburne, Buckland, Ashfield and in all of western MA and New England.

Turbines must be banned because, additionally, it is our tax dollars that pay for these multi-million-dollar, out-of-scale installations, and our money that pays exponentially accelerating electric rates when wind turbines come online. They must be banned because it is morally criminal to build turbines proven worldwide to have a dismal performance as illustrated in a growing number of careful assessments. Turbines are proving only to exacerbate climate and energy problems, not provide the solution promoted. They must be banned at minimum because they constitute a “taking” of private property value.

In simplest terms, there has been “daylight robbery of your nest egg” in Shelburne and Buckland. Unintended or not, government-funded industrial wind is a scam to conscript personal money, investment, savings and assets for other private and corporate entities. It cannot and must not stand!

……

Shelburne Falls Independent editorial note: A proposal to build wind turbines on Mt. Massaemet was withdrawn without prejudice this winter, meaning that a proposal may again be made. However, at this time, there is no proposal on the table to erect wind turbines on Mt. Massaemet.

Helen Schwiesow Parker, Ph.D. (Chilmark, MA)
Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Past Clinical Supervisory Faculty, University of Virginia Medical School
Past Director, Purdue Univ. Achievement Center for Children

Click here for a PDF of the following document.

3/18/12

The purpose of this document is to respond to the Wind Turbine Health Impact Study: Report of Independent Expert Panel of January 2012, which was prepared for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

I’ve been given the opportunity to review the Martha’s Vineyard Commission [3-16-12 draft] Comments on the draft Massachusetts Wind Turbine Health Impact Study, directed to Commissioners Auerbach and Kimmell. Below, “MVC” comments are in blue. Emphasis throughout is mine.

The MVC’s initial characterization of the DEP/DPH Health Study is that it is “a useful, though limited, literature review.” [Did the independent experts just not have TIME to examine very much of the evidence submitted?] Next the MVC notes their concern that “the wording of some conclusions is ambiguous and could lead to misinterpretations that understate the actual or potential health impacts of wind turbines….

“The MVC is concerned that this study might be used as the basis for adoption of excessively permissive state-wide standards that would then be imposed on municipalities with statewide superseding regulations, such as the currently tabled Wind Energy Siting Reform Act….

“‘Absence of Proof of Health Impacts’ is Not the Same as ‘Proof of Absence of Health Impacts.’ The study is often unclear as to whether there is demonstrated evidence that a potential impact does not exist, or whether conclusive studies have not yet been carried out with respect to that factor. [Is this just a BADLY written report? Unintentionally ambiguous, unclear with unjustified conclusions?] In the absence of clear evidence that a given factor is not a problem, it would seem wise to err on the side of caution with respect to development of potentially problematic wind energy projects….

“The report’s ambiguous language about this has already lead to questionable interpretations about the report, such as the Conservation Law Foundation’s statement that “This new, independent study advances the state of science and debunks common misunderstandings regarding potential health impacts of wind turbines.” The study should make clear that it is a partial literature review that summarizes some existing science and does not advance it. It should be made clear that the study’s use of the term “limited epidemiologic evidence” does not imply that these impacts should be ignored, and the current absence of definitive scientific proof that wind turbines directly cause a specific health impact does not necessarily “debunk” contentions that this might be the case….

“In the absence of definitive studies clearly indicating the absence of significant impacts, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission suggests that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…apply the Precautionary Principle, which states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is or is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action….

“For infrasound, the study indicates that ‘A possible coupling mechanism between infrasound and the vestibular system . . . has been proposed but is not yet fully understood or sufficiently explained. Levels of infrasound near wind turbines have been shown to be high enough to be sensed by the OHC [Outer Hair Cells]. However, evidence does not exist to demonstrate the influence of wind turbine-generated infrasound on vestibular mediated effects in the brain.’ This does not justify concluding that there is no link; it merely indicates that these robust studies have not been carried out yet. The study suggests that there doesn’t appear to be a logical explanation for a possible impact of low energy sound levels on the vestibular systems and concludes that it is not worth carrying out further studies about this issue.” (!)

This is a courageous piece. It is nevertheless restrained in tone as perhaps befits a governmental agency. As a colleague wrote recently, “I was raised that ‘you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar,’ but when you’re dealing with thieves & liars, that motto is no longer effective.  Even Jesus turned over the tables in the temple on the hypocrites peddling their wares in His house!  This country is OUR house!  I say it’s time to let them know, ‘We’re mad as hell, and we are NOT going to take it anymore!’”

These are liars and thieves. This report is neither independent nor expert. And its consequences are neither abstract nor academic. Had this limited, unclear, ambiguous report with its unjustified conclusions which understate potential health impacts, leading to misinterpretations and tempting ludicrous claims that it advances science and debunks the validity of observation and self-reports of the impact of turbines on the health of those nearby…. had this report not come out biased, disingenuous and misleading as it did, those trying to stave off the erection of the two behemoths in Fairhaven might have been better able to persuade others in that fair city of the harm soon to be visited upon them.

Their quality of place has been stolen from the residents of Sconticut Neck, Little Bay Woods, and Peirce’s Point. The report is a lie as bald as that put forth by Sumul Shah of Fairhaven Wind LLC, who brushed off audience concerns about flicker at a January wind forum, saying “they mostly occur before 7 a.m.”  Think about that! “Flicker” [more accurately described as strobing] occurs across a broad range of time after sunrise and before sunset, which varies according to the season, at any time when the turbine blades which reach 400’ into the air intermittently block sunlight flowing down past the blades across a broad swath of landscape. Liars and thieves.

And what of the lies told consistently, attempting to rob true independent experts of their credibility and professional integrity. Let’s look at just one example from the MA DEP/DPH report. Referring to Wind Turbine Syndrome, A Report on a Natural Experiment (2009) by Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD, the MA DEP/DPH report states unequivocally: “limitations to the design employed make it impossible for this work to contribute any evidence to the question of whether there is a causal association between wind turbine exposure and health effects” (p24).

Well then! So much for Dr. Pierpont, honors graduate of Yale, MD from Johns Hopkins, PhD in population biology from Princeton. Note a different appraisal from her peer reviewers, Drs. Katz (epidemiology), Lehrer (otolaryngology), Haller (neurology), and Horn (population biology).  All four reviews have been reprinted in their entirety in the book. As excerpted below:

Your high level of scientific integrity is revealed both in your [research] design decisions and in your writing…. You have laid a remarkable, high quality, and honest foundation for others to build upon…. [Y]ou have made a commendable, thorough, careful, honest, and significant contribution to the study of (what we can now call) Wind Turbine Syndrome.” —from the referee report by Ralph V. Katz, DMD, MPH, PhD, Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, Professor and Chair, Department of Epidemiology & Health Promotion NYU College of Dentistry.

The careful documentation of serious physical, neurological and emotional problems provoked by living close to wind turbines must be brought to the attention of physicians who, like me, are unaware of them until now.” —from the referee report by Jerome Haller, MD, Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics (retired 2008), Albany Medical College, Albany, New York. Dr. Haller is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Neurology (Child Neurology Section), and the Child Neurology Society.

Dr. Pierpont has gathered a strong series of case studies of deleterious effects on the health and well-being of many people living near large wind turbines. Furthermore, she has reviewed medical studies that support a plausible physiological mechanism directly linking low frequency noise and vibration (like that produced by wind turbines and which may not in itself be reported as irritating) to potentially debilitating effects on the inner ear and other sensory systems associated with balance and sense of position. Thus the effects are likely to have a physiological component, rather than being exclusively psychological….” —from the referee report by Henry S. Horn, PhD, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Associate of the Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton University.

What problems did the MA “expert independent” panel have with her study design? After having cherry-picked which evidence among the thousands of pages of material to ‘review,’ the panel essentially claimed Pierpont cherry-picked her subjects: “The way in which these participants were recruited makes it impossible to draw any conclusions about attributing causality to the turbines” (p25).

Time and again, the “expert” panel takes liberties with the scientific illiteracy of the public to distort the truth of what they purport to review. Over and over, I asked myself, which side of the stupid fence are they sitting on? As supposed experts equipped with the knowledge of statistics necessary to do a lit review, are they not even familiar with the significance of the “revealed preference measure”?

Sure, the lay public might nod and say, “yeah, she just picked the ones who said they were sick ‘cause they hate the turbines,” or “these guys are just complaining so they’ll get paid to shut up.” In fact, the families in Pierpont’s study all had spent or lost a lot of money trying to get away from the turbines, by selling their homes for reduced amounts, renting or buying a second home, renovating their homes in an attempt to keep out the noise, or outright abandoning their homes.

In epidemiology this is called “a revealed preference measure.” The people who are suffering show by their actions that their health problem is worth more than the thousands of dollars they have lost in trying to escape the exposure, and thereby distinguish their experiences from what might be dismissed as subjective or fakery.

Is the MA “expert” panel ignorant of this statistical nicety, or do they think we’re too stupid or so bludgeoned by their arrogance that we won’t call them on it?

In another instance of taking liberty with the scientific illiteracy of the public to distort the truth of what they purport to review, it’s important to examine the panel’s attempts to confuse, obfuscate, muddle and misuse the term “annoyance.”

Beginning with the “expert” panel report’s executive summary: “Most epidemiologic literature on human response to wind turbines relates to self-reported ‘annoyance,’ and this response appears to be a function of some combination of the sound itself, the sight of the turbine, and attitude towards the wind turbine project.”

Of course, “the public” tends to hear that term and think of a transitory state ranging from “merely” annoyed, to pretty annoyed to seriously annoyed, but in all events it doesn’t mean a person is getting sick over it. Whereas for the medical/mental health professional, there can be some very serious pathology in that ‘annoyance’ box.  (See two-page endnote on “Annoyance.”)

Yet a panel member—Marc G. Weisskopf, ScD Epidemiology; PhD Neuroscience, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Health & Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health—when asked by the press to give the clinical definition of “annoyance,” responded [approximate, not recorded verbatim]: “First of all, there is no clinical definition for ‘annoyance.’ The WHO doesn’t have one since what they see are ‘health effects’ instead. It is by some definitions a ‘self-reported’ effect and does not have a clinical significance.”

Oh, but it can have severe clinical significance! Once again, within the context of this biased and ambiguous report, it’s impossible not to conclude that we’re being toyed with, our appreciation of IWT health impacts intentionally manipulated with semantic games and worse. The panel is not expert or not independent, or both.

Back to the Pierpont study. Using a very robust case-crossover design, Pierpont gathered self-report data on symptoms before, during, and after exposure to the turbines. Within her subject families, all had at least one severely affected adult family member, and affected subjects had gone away from the wind turbines and seen their symptoms go away, and had come back and seen the symptoms return, generally several times. In epidemiology this is called a “case-crossover” design.

This statistical design is an unusually robust one and of choice in situations where both the exposure and the disease are transitory. People distance themselves from the turbines and their symptoms abate or disappear (until they’ve become ingrained over time, unfortunately). Back to the turbine area and the symptoms return. Despite infinite individual differences between subjects, Pierpont found symptom consistency statistically correlated with the presence or absence of the turbines.

What is it about the case-crossover design that causes the “expert” panel to claim that “limitations to the design employed make it impossible for this work to contribute any evidence to the question of whether there is a causal association between wind turbine exposure and health effects” (p24)? The best they can offer (and which just might be persuasive to the casual reader, but would be laughed out of a Psych 101 class): “There are also many factors that change when moving, making it difficult to attribute change to any specific difference with certainty”(p25).

Carl V. Phillips, MPP, PhD, is a Harvard-trained epidemiologist and professor of public health with outstanding credentials including a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. In “Properly Interpreting the Epidemiologic Evidence about the Health Effects of Industrial Wind Turbines on Nearby Residents,” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society, vol. 31, no. 4 (August 2011), pp. 303-315, Phillips is direct in his dismissal of such biased nonsense:

Failure to understand how to draw scientific conclusions and myopia about a single method for modeling physical health effects are problematic, obviously. But they are not so clearly reprehensible, from an ethical standpoint, as telling people that their suffering does not really ‘count’ for some technical reason.”

Phillips introduces the above by summarizing: “There is overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents, usually stress-disorder type diseases, at a nontrivial rate…. There has been no policy analysis that justifies imposing these effects on local residents. The attempts to deny the evidence cannot be seen as honest scientific disagreement, and represent either gross incompetence or intentional bias.” Apply that to the MA DEP/DPH supposedly “Independent Expert” Panel’s Draft report, and you get the most succinct and fair assessment of as you’re going to find anywhere. Let’s hope the final version is markedly improved.

I’d like to turn here to a more constructive response to the MA Wind Turbine Health Impact Study. I’d like to offer my own expert independent position taken after over two years researching the topic, equipped with the following credentials:

I’m a Licensed Clinical Psychologist.  My Ph.D. was earned from Purdue University, which is known for excellence in statistics, research design and interpretation. My doctoral dissertation was on PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). I’m a past Clinical Supervisory Faculty member at the University of Virginia Medical School, with a 6th year degree in Psychometry from Purdue, double Masters Degree in Special Education, past Director of Purdue’s Achievement Center for Children—a groundbreaking institution offering diagnostics and remedial programming in the field of sensory perception and learning disabilities—which draws clients from around the world. I began my career in 1970 as a teacher and administrator at New Haven’s Benhaven, the world-renowned private agency serving children, adolescents, and adults with autism and pervasive developmental disabilities.

My experience and training allow me to appreciate the subtle connections between the low frequency sound waves emitted by industrial scale wind turbines, and the Wind Turbine Syndrome (WTS). We’re not, after all, bionic man. We’re made of flesh and blood and very complicated moving parts ourselves. The sub-audible waves sent out by the turbines set up vibrations and resonance within the cavities of our bodies – ear, ocular orb, skull, our lungs and bellies – which make us nauseous and confused, and in many people provoke vertigo (a spinning dizziness), anxiety, blurred vision, tinnitus (painful ringing in the ears) headaches, tachycardia, difficulty with memory and concentration, panic episodes associated with sensations of movement or quivering inside the body that arise while awake or asleep. Of course they do. They are the ultimate and inescapable boom-box moved in next door. Imagine yourself unable to escape the pulsations.

In addition, I’m absolutely, crystal-clearly certain that, while nearby IWTs surely lead to sleep deprivation in some individuals [unhealthy in itself and which may lead to other significant health problems for those impacted], the effect of the turbine noise (whether “heard” as unnatural, percussive, threatening, “annoying”—or felt as infrasound, consciously or unconsciously) ….. the effect of turbine noise on mental health is direct, powerful, distinct from and additive to the turbines’ effect on sleep alone, significant as that is to health and wellbeing, safety and optimal functioning.

The “negative effect of the turbines on mental health” may to some extent, in some cases, result from the neurophysiological effects on the otolaryngological mechanisms suggested by Pierpont and elaborated by Salt.  Yet other “negative effects of the turbines on mental health” clearly stand alone and outside this mechanism, perhaps with a causality more easily appreciated by the layperson.  Remember that the Israeli army has used infrasound as crowd control for some years..… Put “infrasound interrogation” in your browser.

In many ways, the fundamentals of psychology are intuitive if the layman only stops to think or put oneself into another’s shoes.  The effect of IWTs on mental health and wellbeing is no exception and must be factored into IWT siting decisions:

» Can we appreciate the hypersensitivity of the autistic child?  Can we replicate it empathetically in our own sensory structure?  What do you think is the impact of bombarding an autistic child with additive, strident, unpredictable, chronic, aversive stimuli?

» How many people who have chosen to live in semi-rural environments (now targeted for IWT installations) have a similar, albeit less radical, sensitivity to noise?  How many chose to locate where their homes are simple shelters welcoming the outside in, for whom the idea of ‘sound mitigation’ from turbine noise fairly equals life in a padded cell?  For what purpose?

» Is it so hard to imagine what our classmates experienced in the hellhole of Vietnam?  The baggage returning with our Veterans from the Middle East?  You’ve heard of PTSD: “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”  Do you know that the symptom constellation includes “intense psychological distress or physiological reactivity [heightened sensitivity] when the person is exposed to triggering events that resemble or symbolize an aspect of the traumatic event” [DSM-IV]?  Is it so hard to relate to what the throbbing drone of the turbines bring back to their cellular storage of fear/terror/anxiety?  Would you want it brought back, had you experienced it—once again up close and within earshot, but this time at home, where you had invested yourself and your future, believing you were now out of the war zone and safe? And what do we know about the health impacts of the stress hormone cortisol? Quite a bit.

» Beam yourself into the shoes of those with a history of migraine headaches, now exacerbated by the unpredictable whims of the wind.  Do we dare entertain an image of what our neighbors suffer when these debilitating headaches now come (still) unpredictably but (now) exacerbated by these towers put up without public input (as in Falmouth, MA) or without informed public or political process (as throughout the world)?

» Add in the psychological distress engendered by the physiological destabilization which Pierpont describes with respect to balance mechanisms, nausea, tinnitus, vertigo, anxiety, panic attacks, memory and concentration loss.

» Add in the victims’ helplessness to effect change, betrayal by elected representatives whom we count on to protect our health and well-being, who now stonewall any consideration of our objective outrage of the clear torture waged on our persons.  Add in the demands to fight these installations, on-goingly, with lives given over to complaint protocols, sound measurements, letters to representatives, discouraging consultations with group-hired attorneys, a desire to re-frame every social encounter either to score a point or to pretend this isn’t the center of your life.

You think all this doesn’t impact mental heath? Give me sleep disruption any day.

Health care professionals and academic investigators mustn’t limit their investigations into the health impacts of IWTs to sleep disruption and its direct consequences.  Each of us can make this common-sensical argument to our elected representatives, take it to the streets, to the press.   It’s a very important no-brainer for anyone open to listen for the truth.

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Endnote on “Annoyance”

(1) In 1991, Suter commented that “Annoyance” has been the term used [in scientific studies] to describe the community’s collective feelings about noise ever since the early noise surveys in the 1950s and 1960s, although some have suggested that this term tends to minimize the impact. While “aversion” or “distress” might be more appropriate descriptors, their use would make comparisons to previous research difficult. It should be clear, however, that annoyance can connote more than a slight irritation; it can mean a significant degradation in the quality of life. This represents a degradation of health in accordance with the WHO’s definition of health, meaning total physical and mental well-being, as well as the absence of disease.” (p. 27)

Suter, A. H. (1991). Noise and its effects. Administrative Conference of the United States.

(2) Adults who indicated chronically severe annoyance by neighbourhood noise were found to have an increased health risk for the cardiovascular system and the movement apparatus, as well as an increased risk of depression and migraine.

Niemann H, Bonnefoy X, Braubach M, Hecht K, Maschke C, Rodrigues C, Robbel N. Noise-induced annoyance and morbidity results from the pan-European LARES study. Noise Health.

(3) “According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health should be regarded as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

“Under this broad definition, noise-induced annoyance is an adverse health effect.”

Michaud DS, Keith SE, McMurchy D. (2005). Noise annoyance in Canada. Noise Health 2005;7:39-47 [Note Dr. Mchaud is a staff member of Health Canada]

(4) Evidence/references by Respondents during the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal Decision July 2011-10-03.

“The most common effect of community noise is annoyance, which is considered an adverse health effect by the World Health Organization.” Health Canada.  Reference Submitted by Dr. Kenneth Mundt.

“…reputable research has shown that noise annoyance is an adverse health effect that can result from wind farms, as it can result in effects such as negative emotions and sleep disturbance.”  General Purpose Standing Committee No. 5 Rural wind farms Ordered to be printed 16 December 2009 according to Standing Order 231 Reference submitted by Dr. Leventhall.

“No, I don’t disagree with your statement; annoyance is a health effect.”  Transcript of Dr. C. Ollson, Mar, 22, 2011, p. 118, l. 4 to l. 21 testimony under oath by Dr. Christopher Ollson.

(5) “The audible sound from wind turbines, at the levels experienced at typical receptor distances in Ontario, is nonetheless expected to result in a non-trivial percentage of persons being highly annoyed. As with sounds from many sources, research has shown that annoyance associated with sound from wind turbines can be expected to contribute to stress related health impacts in some persons.”

Low frequency Noise and Infrasound Associated with Wind Turbine Generation Systems, A Literature Review, Ontario Ministry of Environment RFP Final Draft December 2010

(6) “References, both from peer-reviewed and other literature, acknowledge that IWTs may cause annoyance and/or stress and/or sleep disturbance (Colby et al., 2009 Minnesota Department of Health, 2009; Pedersen & Persson Waye, 2004, 2007; Rideout, Copes, & Bos, 2010; Thorne, 2010).”

Carmen M. E. Krogh, Industrial Wind Turbine Development and Loss of Social Justice? Bulletin of Science Technology & Society 2011 31: 321, DOI: 10.1177/0270467611412550 http://bst.sagepub.com/content/31/4/321

(7) Maschke et al. (2007) confirms chronic severe annoyance induced by neighbour noise must be classified as a serious health risk.

Maschke, C., Niemann, A. Health effects of annoyance induced by neighbour noise. Noise Control Eng. J. 55 (3), 2007 May-June.

Editor’s note:  Click here for the source.

Editor’s note:  Last week the Town of Fairhaven, MA, held a wind turbine “blade signing” celebration.  For many in the community, it was a time to demonstrate their sorrow and anger.

Click anywhere on the images, below, to watch the video.

“Wind turbine noise seems to affect health adversely, and an independent review of evidence is needed”

—Christopher D. Hanning, MD,^† and Alun Evans, MD,^‡ British Medical Journal (3/8/12)

The evidence for adequate sleep as a prerequisite for human health, particularly child health, is overwhelming. Governments have recently paid much attention to the effects of environmental noise on sleep duration and quality, and to how to reduce such noise.¹ However, governments have also imposed noise from industrial wind turbines on large swathes of peaceful countryside.

The impact of road, rail, and aircraft noise on sleep and daytime functioning (sleepiness and cognitive function) is well established.¹ Shortly after wind turbines began to be erected close to housing, complaints emerged of adverse effects on health. Sleep disturbance was the main complaint.² Such reports have been dismissed as being subjective and anecdotal, but experts contend that the quantity, consistency, and ubiquity of the complaints constitute epidemiological evidence of a strong link between wind turbine noise, ill health, and disruption of sleep.³

The noise emitted by a typical onshore 2.5 MW wind turbine has two main components. A dynamo mounted on an 80 m tower is driven through a gear train by blades as long as 45 m, and this generates both gear train noise and aerodynamic noise as the blades pass through the air, causing vortices to be shed from the edges. Wind constantly changes its velocity and direction, which means that the inflowing airstream is rarely stable. In addition, wind velocity increases with height (wind shear), especially at night, and there may be inflow turbulence from nearby structures—in particular, other turbines. This results in an impulsive noise, which is variously described as “swishing” and “thumping,” and which is much more annoying than other sources of environmental noise and is poorly masked by ambient noise.^{4, 5}

Permitted external noise levels and setback distances vary between countries. UK guidance, ETSU-R-97, published in 1997 and not reviewed since, permits a night time noise level of 42 dBA, or 5 dBA above ambient noise level, whichever is the greater. This means that turbines must be set back by a minimum distance of 350-500 m, depending on the terrain and the turbines, from human habitation.

The aerodynamic noise generated by wind turbines has a large low frequency and infrasound component that is attenuated less with distance than higher frequency noise. Current noise measurement techniques and metrics tend to obscure the contribution of impulsive low frequency noise and infrasound.⁶ A laboratory study has shown that low frequency noise is considerably more annoying than higher frequency noise and is harmful to health—it can cause nausea, headaches, disturbed sleep, and cognitive and psychological impairment.⁷ A cochlear mechanism has been proposed that outlines how infrasound, previously disregarded because it is below the auditory threshold, could affect humans and contribute to adverse effects.⁸

Sixteen per cent of surveyed respondents who lived where calculated outdoor turbine noise exposures exceeded 35 dB LAeq (LAeq, the constant sound level that, in a given time period, would convey the same sound energy as the actual time varying sound level, weighted to approximate the response of the human ear) reported disturbed sleep.⁴ A questionnaire survey concluded that turbine noise was more annoying at night, and that interrupted sleep and difficulty in returning to sleep increased with calculated noise level.⁹ Even at the lowest noise levels, 20% of respondents reported disturbed sleep at least one night a month. In a meta-analysis of three European datasets (n=1764),¹⁰ sleep disturbance clearly increased with higher calculated noise levels in two of the three studies.

In a survey of people residing in the vicinity of two US wind farms, those living within 375-1400 m reported worse sleep and more daytime sleepiness, in addition to having lower summary scores on the mental component of the short form 36 health survey than those who lived 3-6.6 km from a turbine. Modelled dose-response curves of both sleep and health scores against distance from nearest turbine were significantly related after controlling for sex, age, and household clustering, with a sharp increase in effects between 1 km and 2 km.¹¹ A New Zealand survey showed lower health related quality of life, especially sleep disturbance, in people who lived less than 2 km from turbines.¹²

A large body of evidence now exists to suggest that wind turbines disturb sleep and impair health at distances and external noise levels that are permitted in most jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom. Sleep disturbance may be a particular problem in children,¹ and it may have important implications for public health. When seeking to generate renewable energy through wind, governments must ensure that the public will not suffer harm from additional ambient noise. Robust independent research into the health effects of existing wind farms is long overdue, as is an independent review of existing evidence and guidance on acceptable noise levels.

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Author disclosure re. competing interests:  Both authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; CDH has given expert evidence on the effects of wind turbine noise on sleep and health at wind farm planning inquiries in the UK and Canada but has derived no personal benefit; he is a member of the board of the Society for Wind Vigilance; AE has written letters of objection on health grounds to wind farm planning applications in Ireland.

This article was not commissioned by the British Medical Journal, and it was externally peer reviewed.

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References:

1.  World Health Organization. Burden of disease from environmental noise. 2011.

2.  Krogh C, Gillis L, Kouwen N, Aramini J. WindVOiCe, a self-reporting survey: adverse health effects, industrial wind turbines, and the need for vigilance monitoring. Bull Sci Tech Soc 2011;31:334-9.

3.  Phillips C. Properly interpreting the epidemiologic evidence about the health effects of industrial wind turbines on nearby residents. Bull Sci Tech Soc 2011;31:303-8.

4. Pedersen E, Persson Waye K. Perception and annoyance due to wind turbine noise—a dose-response relationship. J Acoust Soc Am 2004;116:3460-70.

5.  Pedersen E, van den Berg F, Bakker R, Bouma J. Can road traffic mask sound from wind turbines? Response to wind turbine sound at different levels of road traffic sound. Energy Policy 2010;38:2520-7.

6.  Bray W, James R. Dynamic measurements of wind turbine acoustic signals, employing sound quality engineering methods considering the time and frequency sensitivities of human perception. Proceedings of Noise-Con 2011, Portland, Oregon, 25-27 July 2011. Curran Associates, 2011.

7.  Møller M, Pedersen C. Low frequency noise from large wind turbines. J Acoust Soc Am 2010;129:3727-44.

8.  Salt A, Kaltenbach J. Infrasound from wind turbines could affect humans. Bull Sci Tech Soc 2011;31:296-303.

9.  Van den Berg G, Pedersen E, Bouma J, Bakker R. Project WINDFARMperception. Visual and acoustic impact of wind turbine farms on residents. FP6-2005-Science-and-Society-20. Specific support action project no 044628, 2008.

10.  Pedersen E. Effects of wind turbine noise on humans. Proceedings of the Third International Meeting on Wind Turbine Noise, Aalborg Denmark 17-19 June 2009.

11.  Nissenbaum M, Aramini J, Hanning C. Adverse health effects of industrial wind turbines: a preliminary report. Proceedings of 10th International Congress on Noise as a Public Health Problem (ICBEN), 2011, London, UK. Curran Associates, 2011.

12.  Shepherd D, McBride D, Welch D, Dirks K, Hill E. Evaluating the impact of wind turbine noise on health related quality of life. Noise Health 2011;13:333-9.
.

^†Sleep Disorders Service, University Hospitals of Leicester, Leicester General Hospital, Leicester LE5 4PW, UK

^‡Centre for Public Health, Queen’s University of Belfast, Institute of Clinical Science B, Belfast, UK

“The Subsidy That Flows, Whatever the Weather”

… by Josh

Editor’s note:  The following cartoon, by “Josh,” was created to illustrate the superb article by Matt Ridley, “The Beginning of the End of Wind.”  Read Ridley’s article, then savor this cartoon.
.

(With appreciation to Hurwitt.  The tombstone text has been altered.)

Editor’s note:  Jane & Julian Davis, who have often appeared in these pages, sued the wind developer for making their home & property uninhabitable.  (Click here and here.)  Both Davises suffered from severe Wind Turbine Syndrome.  They had to move out of their home and farm.  (Jane is a nurse midwife.) Eventually, they sued the developer and took him to the UK’s highest court.

On the eve of winning their suit, the Davises took a settlement, which included a gag clause.  They would, forevermore, never speak publicly about their ordeal.  And their home was bought by the developer, at “fire sale” cost.

“‘Noise nuisance’ farmhouse is sold”

—in the Spalding Guardian:  Lincolnshire Free Press (3/16/12)

The farmhouse at the heart of a High Court battle over an alleged noise nuisance created by the wind farm at Deeping St Nicholas has been sold.

The sale of the property at Grays Farm, on North Drove Bank, Spalding, has been revealed in Land Registry documents more than three months after a secret settlement was reached in the case.

The new owners have been registered as Fenland Windfarms Ltd – one of the parties that was being sued by Jane and Julian Davis as part of the proceedings.

The firm, along with RC Tinsley Ltd, Nicholas Watts and Fenland Green Power Co-operative Ltd, had all denied liability.

The public property register documents also show the sale price to be £125,000 – more than 20 per cent less than the house had been judged to be worth five years ago. The property had been valued at £165,000 by surveyors in 2007.

The company has since declined to comment on its intentions for the house.

Tammy Calvert, from Energy4All Limited and Associated Co-ops on behalf of Fenland Windfarms, said: “All parties to the claim, Davis v Tinsley and Others, which was being heard by Mr Justice Hickinbottom in the High Court and which was due to resume in Court on December 1, 2011, are pleased to report that the case has been settled.

“The terms of that settlement are strictly confidential, and the parties will not be answering any questions about the terms of that agreement.”

The private settlement was made just two days before expert witnesses were due to be called before the High Court for the case in December.

It brought an end to a five-year battle for Mr and Mrs Davis, who claimed they were driven out of their home because of the noise from the eight wind turbines.

They had told the court the sounds and vibrations had varied from a low-key hum to a swoosh and pulsing beat.

The couple moved out into rented accommodation in Spalding when they claimed the noise had left them unable to sleep.

Their claim was not backed by wind farm landowner Mr Watts, who lives 910 metres from the nearest turbine.

Mrs Davis said: “We are looking forward to moving on with our lives but can not make any further comment on the settlement of the case.”

“All I can say is—’WOW!'”

—John Methia, South Coast Today (3/16/12)

Now that the twin turbines are being erected let the WOW! factor kick in.

WOW!  It’s high; I can see it from my house!  WOW! It’s going to be right there?

WOW! I really can hear it from where I live, they said I wouldn’t?

WOW!  Look at all of the trees that were cut down and forest trampled for this “Green” project!

WOW!  Where has the wildlife gone?

WOW!  Aren’t they kind of close to the bike path?

WOW!  What’s that swooshing sound?  This used to be a serene and relaxing walk!

WOW!  I thought my taxes and electric bill would be going down?  WOW!  Close the blinds!

WOW!  Now I can see why Mattapoisett, Wareham, Dartmouth, Bourne and New Bedford said NO!  WOW!  Who do I call about this sound?

WOW!  Maybe those things are too close to the new Wood school site?  Why didn’t we know about this before the vote?  WOW!  Didn’t a member of the Board of Selectmen say you would barely see them over the treeline?

WOW!  Now I can see why town officials asked the developer to keep this “low key.”

WOW!  Our Board of Health is failing us in not acting to protect our health and wellbeing, as the town of Bourne’s Board of Health has!

WOW!  Shall we re-draw the town seal?  Our picturesque and historic skyline has changed forever!  WOW!  These twin turbines have divided our good town with the literal overshadowing of what could have been a wonderful 200th birthday celebration!  WOW!

Now it’s time to act, time for the political machine that is behind the backroom and executive session dealings responsible for this to be replaced, so (with apologies to The Who) we won’t be WOWed again!

 400,000 Dead Birds a Year and Counting

—Robert Bryce, CounterPunch (3/15/12)

In 2009, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that the domestic wind turbines are killing about 440,000 birds per year. Since then, the wind industry has been riding a rapid growth spurt.

But that growth has slowed dramatically due to a tsunami of cheap natural gas and hefty taxpayer subsidies. Even worse: that cheap gas looks like it will last for many years and Congress has been unwilling to extend the 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour subsidy for wind operators that expires at the end of this year.

And now, the wind industry is facing yet another massive headache: increasing resistance from environmental groups who are concerned about the effect that unrestrained construction of wind turbines is having on birds and bats. Ninety environmental groups, led by the American Bird Conservancy, have signed onto the “bird-smart wind petition” which has been submitted to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

It’s about time. Over the past two decades, the federal government has prosecuted hundreds of cases against oil and gas producers and electricity producers for violating some of America’s oldest wildlife-protection laws: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Eagle Protection Act. But the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — has never prosecuted the wind industry despite myriad examples of widespread, unpermitted bird kills by turbines. A violation of either law can result in a fine of $250,000 and/or imprisonment for two years.

But amidst all the hoopla about “clean energy” the wind industry is being allowed to continue its illegal slaughter of some of America’s most precious wildlife. Even more perverse: taxpayers — thanks to billions of dollars given to the wind industry through the production tax credit and federal stimulus package — are subsidizing that slaughter.

Last June, Louis Sahagun, a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, reported that about 70 golden eagles per year are being killed by the wind turbines at Altamont Pass, located about 20 miles east of Oakland. A 2008 study funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency estimated that about 2,400 raptors, including burrowing owls, American kestrels, and red-tailed hawks — as well as about 7,500 other birds, nearly all of which are protected under the Migratory Bird Treat Act — are being killed every year by the turbines at Altamont.

A pernicious double standard is at work here and it riles Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who wrote the petition to the Fish and Wildlife Service for the American Bird Conservancy. He told me, “It’s absolutely clear that there’s been a mandate from the top” echelons of the federal government not to prosecute the wind industry for violating wildlife laws.

Glitzenstein comes to this issue from the Left. Before forming his own law firm, he worked for Public Citizen, an organization created by Ralph Nader. But when it comes to wind energy, “Many environmental groups have been claiming that too few people are paying attention to the science of climate change, but some of those same groups are ignoring the science that shows wind energy’s negative impacts on bird and bat populations.”

That willful ignorance may be ending. The Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and Defenders of Wildlife recently filed a lawsuit against officials in Kern County, California, in an effort to block the construction of two proposed wind projects — North Sky River and Jawbone — due to concerns about their impact on local bird populations. The groups oppose the projects because of their proximity to the deadly Pine Tree facility, which the Fish and Wildlife Service believes is killing 1,595 birds, or about 12 birds per megawatt of installed capacity, per year.

The only time a public entity has pressured the wind industry for killing birds occurred in 2010, when California brokered a $2.5 million settlement with NextEra Energy Resources for bird kills at Altamont. The lawyer on that case: former attorney general and current Gov. Jerry Brown, who’s now pushing the Golden State to get 33 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2020.

Despite the toll that wind turbines are taking on wildlife, the wind industry wants to keep its get-out-of-jail-free card. Last May, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed new guidelines for wind turbine installations. The American Wind Energy Association has responded by calling the proposed rules “unworkable” and “extremely problematic.”

Given that many billions of dollars are at stake, it’s not surprising that the wind industry is eager to downplay its effect on wildlife. And while much of the focus has been on birds, bats are getting whacked, too. Last July, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the 420 wind turbines that have been erected in Pennsylvania “killed more than 10,000 bats last year…That’s an average of 25 bats per turbine per year, and the Nature Conservancy predicts that as many as 2,900 turbines will be set up across the state by 2030.” A coalition of environmental groups have mobilized to fight the proposed Shaffer Mountain wind project in Pennsylvania because of its possible effect on the endangered Indiana bat.

Last November, that coalition – which includes Allegheny Plateau Audubon Society, the Allegheny Front Hawk Watch, Sensible Wind Solutions, the Mountain Laurel Chapter of Trout Unlimited — sent a 60-day notice of intent to sue the Fish and Wildlife Service for issuing an opinion that may allow the Shaffer Mountain project to go forward. The letter cited Michael Gannon, a bat expert and professor of biology at Penn State University, who said that “there is an unprecedented risk to Indiana bats at the Shaffer Mountain project site.” He continued, saying the project could “jeopardize the species’ survival and recovery efforts.”

The backlash against the wind industry that’s now coming from the Left, has clearly put the Obama administration in a tight spot. President Obama has repeatedly said he favors renewable energy. But now, even the Sierra Club is saying that mandatory rules are needed for proper wind turbine siting.

In closing, a little historical perspective. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote extensively about the issue of bird kills in open oil pits. At that time, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that about 100,000 ducks and 500,000 other migratory birds per year were being killed by the pits, which were trapping and poisoning the birds. The problem was widespread and the agency’s division of law enforcement launched a multi-year, multi-state investigation and enforcement effort. And rightly so. The oil companies were violating the law. They were killing birds without a permit. To get into compliance they had to either put nets over their pits or get rid of them. The Fish and Wildlife Service, working with the Department of Justice, brought charges against the companies under both the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Eagle Protection Act.

But today, more than two decades later, the Fish and Wildlife Service is turning a blind eye to bird kills by the wind industry, even though that industry is killing nearly the same number of birds per year as the oil and gas sector was back in the 1980s.

Wildlife protection is essential. But the broader – and more important — issue at hand is equitable treatment under the law. Do we have one law for everyone in America? Or are certain politically favored classes exempt from enforcement? That’s the question that needs to be addressed. And unless or until the Obama administration actually prosecutes the wind industry for bird kills, the answer will be obvious.

……

Robert Bryce is the author of Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.

Homeowners refuse to surrender the “beauty and grace of place” to wind turbine industrialization

Editor’s note:  The following is the Discussion section from an interesting survey done last spring by Central Michigan University.  Feelings ran high about Duke Energy’s proposed “Gail Windpower” project.  The chief lament among those opposed was that they were losing their beautiful, rural countryside to industrialization.

The good news is, the project was killed.  This is an explanation from the Duke Energy website (1/18/12):

Due to its need to focus on the construction of five new U.S. wind farms in 2012, Duke Energy Renewables is discontinuing development of the proposed Gail Windpower Project in Benzie County and Manistee County in Michigan. . . .

“Without question, the proposed Gail Windpower Project was the catalyst for a tremendous amount of discussion about wind energy in the region; much of it was respectful and fact-based, some of it less so,” said VP Milt Howard. “The exceptional natural wind resource in the region is not going away, so we encourage the counties and townships to continue pursuing a productive, fact-based dialogue about wind energy in the months ahead.”

Reading the following Discussion gives you a clue to why the project was shit-canned:  it was met with vigorous and informed opposition..

“The views of township residents about alternative energy and the Duke Energy “Gail Windpower” project”

—Mary S. Senter, Center for Applied Research & Rural Studies, Central Michigan University (4/22/11)

Discussion (pp. 28-30):

The Center for Applied Research & Rural Studies (CARRS) has conducted scores of community surveys since its inception. No survey project has generated as much interest as this one supported by Duke Energy. In fact, several landowners called us to make sure that we had appropriate contact information for them and to ensure that their viewpoints were included in the study.

Such interest is testament to the widespread interest among community members in the proposed Gail Windpower Project. And, this sample of township landowners shows how split the community is on this issue.

The number of people who have “no opinion” on the project is relatively low at less than 10 percent. Among people with a point of view, opinion is split almost 50/50, with slightly more landowners opposed to than supportive of the project. lt is important to note, however, that sample members who are opposed to the project are more likely to say that they are “definitely opposed,” while respondents who favor the project arc more likely to say that they “probably support” rather than “definitely support” the wind power project.

In addition, people who report that they are very knowledgeable about alternative energy and wind energy are more likely than the less knowledgeable to be opposed to the project.  Similarly, landowners who say that they are following the news about the Gail Windpower Project a great deal and who talk to residents in the area about the project are also more likely to be opponents rather than supporters. ln fact, educational level of the respondent is negatively related to project support, as highly educated respondents are more likely than poorly educated respondents to be opposed to the project. . . .

Finally, it is clear that a majority of landowners in Arcadia, Blaine, Joyfield, and Pleasanton townships give high ratings to the quality oflife in this corner of northwest lower Michigan, and those respondents who give the quality of life the highest ratings are the ones most opposed to the Gail Windpower Project. Interestingly, the chief reason for opposition the the wind power project involves concerns about its impact on the beauty of the area.

While technology may assist with the dampening of noise levels or vibration, people’s sense of aesthetics and their concerns about the project’s viewshed are not readily amenable to quick or technical fixes.

“Survey finds high rate of Wind Turbine Syndrome from newer turbine models”

—Miriam Raftery, East County Magazine, Calif. (3/10/12)

With two new wind farms proposed for our region and another already in operation, evaluating potential health impacts is important.

A survey was conducted on wind farm noise as part of a Master’s dissertation by Zhenhua Wang, a graduate student in Geography, Environment and Population at the University of Adelaide, Australia.  The results show that 70% of respondents living up to 5 kilometers away report being negatively affected by wind turbine noise, with more than 50% of them “very or moderately negatively affected.”  This is considerably higher than what was found in previous studies conducted in Europe.

The survey was made in the vicinity of the Waterloo wind farm, South Australia, which is composed of 37 Vestas V90 3 MW turbines stretching over 18 km.  These mega turbines are reported to be emitting more low frequency noise (LFN) than smaller models, and this causes more people to be affected, and over greater distances, by the usual symptoms of the Wind Turbine Syndrome (WTS): insomnia, headaches, nausea, stress, poor ability to concentrate, irritability, etc., leading to poorer health and a reduced immunity to illness.

The wind industry has consistently downplayed concerns over health issues, disputing findings such as those made by Dr. Nina Pierpont in her book and peer-reviewed report, Wind Turbine Syndrome.  Dr. Pierpont received her medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and holds a PhD from Princeton University.

However, some jurisdictions are enacting regulations to protect residents as evidence mounts to suggest negative health impacts are a dark side of going green through wind energy.

The Danish government recognized recently that LFN is an aggravating component in the noise that affects wind farm neighbors.  This prompted their issuing regulations that limit low-frequency noise levels inside homes to 20 dB(A).  Unfortunately, as denounced by Professor Henrik Møller, they manipulated the calculation parameters so as to allow LFN inside homes to actually reach 30 dB(A) in 30% of cases.  “Hardly anyone would accept 30 dB(A) in their homes at night”, wrote the professor last month.

A summary of the Australian survey has been published, but the full Masters dissertation has not been made available to the public.  In the interest of public health, the European Platform against Windfarms (EPAW) and the North-American Platform against Windpower (NA-PAW), have asked the University of Adelaide to release this important document.

A neighbor of the Waterloo wind farm, Mr Andreas Marciniak, wrote to a local newspaper last week:  “Do you think it’s funny that at my age I had to move to Adelaide into my Mother’s shed and my brother had to move to Hamilton into a caravan with no water or electricity?”  Both Mr Marciniak and his brother have been advised by their treating doctors, including a cardiologist, to leave their homes and not return when the wind turbines are turning.

How many people will be forced to abandon their homes before governments pay attention, wonder the thousands of wind farm victims represented by EPAW and NAPAW.  “It’ll take time to gather enough money for a big lawsuit,” says Sherri Lange, of NAPAW. “But time is on our side: victim numbers are increasing steadily.”

—Matt Ridley, Spectator.co.uk (3/3/12)

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

This forces a decision from Cameron — will he reassure the turbine magnates that he plans to keep subsidising wind energy, or will he retreat? The political wind has certainly changed direction. George Osborne is dead set against wind farms, because it has become all too clear to him how much they cost. The Chancellor’s team quietly encouraged MPs to sign a letter to No. 10 a few weeks ago saying that ‘in these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines’.

Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.

In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, ‘policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum’ or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.

America is having far better luck. Carbon emissions in the United States fell by 7 per cent in 2009, according to a Harvard study. But the study concluded that this owes less to the recession that year than the falling price of natural gas — caused by the shale gas revolution. (Burning gas emits less than half as much carbon dioxide as coal for the same energy output.) The gas price has fallen even further since, making coal seem increasingly pricey by comparison. All over America, from Utah to West Virginia, coal mines are being closed and coal plants idled or cancelled. (The US Energy Information Administration calculates that every $4 spent on shale purchases the same energy as $25 spent on oil: at this rate, more and more vehicles will switch to gas.)

So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.

Though they may not admit it for a while, most ministers have realised that the sums for wind power just don’t add up and never will. The discovery of shale gas near Blackpool has profound implications for the future of British energy supply, which the government has seemed sheepishly reluctant to explore. It has a massive subsidy programme in place for wind farms, which now seem obsolete both as a means of energy production and decarbonisation. It is almost impossible to see what function they serve, other than making a fortune from those who profit from the subsidy scam.

Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?

One answer is money. There were too many people with snouts in the trough. Not just the manufacturers, operators and landlords of the wind farms, but financiers: wind-farm venture capital trusts were all the rage a few years ago — guaranteed income streams are what capitalists like best; they even get paid to switch the monsters off on very windy days so as not to overload the grid. Even the military took the money. Wind companies are paying for a new £20 million military radar at Brizlee Wood in Northumberland so as to enable the Ministry of Defence to lift its objection to the 48-turbine Fallago Rig wind farm in Berwickshire.

The big conservation organisations have been disgracefully silent on the subject, like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which until last year took generous contributions from the wind industry through a venture called RSPB Energy. Even journalists: at a time when advertising is in short supply, British newspapers have been crammed full of specious but lucrative ‘debates’ and supplements on renewable energy sponsored by advertising from a cohort of interest groups.

And just as the scam dies, I find I am now part of it. A family trust has signed a deal to receive £8,500 a year from a wind company, which is building a turbine on land that once belonged to my grandfather. He was canny enough not to sell the mineral rights, and the foundations of the turbine disturbs those mineral rights, so the trustees are owed compensation. I will not get the money, because I am not a beneficiary of the trust. Nonetheless, the idea of any part of my family receiving ‘wind-gelt’ is so abhorrent that I have decided to act. The real enemy is not wind farms per se, but groupthink and hysteria which allowed such a flawed idea to progress — with a minimum of intellectual opposition. So I shall be writing a cheque for £8,500, which The Spectator will give as a prize to the best article devoted to rational, fact-based environmental journalism.

It will be called the Matt Ridley prize for environmental heresy. Barring bankruptcy, I shall donate the money as long as the wind-gelt flows — so the quicker Dave cancels the subsidy altogether, the sooner he will have me and the prizewinners off his back.

Entrants are invited forthwith, and a panel of judges will reward the most brilliant and rational argument — that uses reason and evidence — to gore a sacred cow of the environmental movement. There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest, or that organic farming is good for the planet, or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species, or that the most sustainable thing we can do is de-industrialise.

My donation, though significant for me, is a drop in the ocean compared with the money that pours into the green movement every hour. Jeremy Grantham, a hedge-fund plutocrat, wrote a cheque for £12 million to the London School of Economics to found an institute named after him, which has since become notorious for its aggressive stance and extreme green statements. Between them, Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) spend nearly a billion a year. WWF spends $68 million a year on ‘public education’ alone. All of this is judged uncontroversial: a matter of education, not propaganda.

By contrast, a storm of protest broke recently over the news that one small conservative think-tank called Heartland was proposing to spend just $200,000 in a year on influencing education against climate alarmism. A day later, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, with assets of $7.2 billion, gave a grant of $100 million to something called the ClimateWorks Foundation, a pro-wind power organisation, on top of $481 million it gave to the same recipient in 2008. The deep green Sierra Club recently admitted that it took $26 million from the gas industry to lobby against coal. But money is not the only reason that the entire political establishment came to believe in wind fairies. Psychologists have a term for the wishful thinking by which we accept any means if the end seems virtuous: ‘noble-cause corruption’. The phrase was first used by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir John Woodcock in 1992 to explain miscarriages of justice. ‘It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned,’ said the late Lord Denning, referring to the Birmingham Six.

Politicians are especially susceptible to this condition. In a wish to be seen as modern, they will embrace all manner of fashionable causes. When this sets in — groupthink grips political parties, and the media therefore decide there is no debate — the gravest of errors can take root. The subsidising of useless wind turbines was born of a deep intellectual error, one incubated by failure to challenge conventional wisdom.

It is precisely this consensus-worshipping, heretic-hunting environment where the greatest errors can be made. There are some 3,500 wind turbines in Britain, with hundreds more under construction. It would be a shame for them all to be dismantled. The biggest one should remain, like a crane on an abandoned quay, for future generations to marvel at. They will never be an efficient way to generate power. But there can be no better monument to the folly of mankind.

…..

Matt, an acclaimed author and former Science and Technology Editor for the Economist blogs at www.rationaloptimist.com.

Senator Lamar Alexander has 2 balls and 1 brain!  The right stuff in the proper proportions!

“It’s Time to End Big Wind’s Big Loophole”

—Press release from Senator Alexander’s office (2/15/12)

And what do we get for these billions in subsidies? A puny amount of unreliable electricity that arrives disproportionately at night when we don’t need it. Americans … are finding out that these are not your grandma’s windmills. These gigantic turbines, which look so pleasant on the television ads paid for by the people getting all the tax breaks … are three times as high as stadiums … taller than the Statue of Liberty … blades are as wide as a football field. You can see the blinking lights for 20 miles … and on top of that, these giant turbines have become the Cuisinart in the sky for birds”—Lamar Alexander

WASHINGTON—In a speech today on the floor of the United States Senate, U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) called on Congress to reject any efforts to “put in the payroll tax agreement a four-year extension of the so-called production tax credit,” calling it “a big loophole for the rich and for the investment bankers.”

Alexander said: “Let’s not even think about putting this tax break for the rich in the middle of an extension of a tax deduction for working Americans this week. Let’s focus on reducing the debt, increasing expenditure for research and getting rid of the subsidies. Twenty years is long enough for a wind production tax credit for what our distinguished Nobel prize-winning Secretary of Energy says is a ‘mature technology.’”

The full transcript follows:

Madam President, there are reports in some of the newspapers this morning that there is an effort to try to slip into the negotiation about extending the payroll tax break for the next year a big loophole for the rich and for the investment bankers and for most of the people President Obama keeps talking about as people whose taxes he would like to raise. What I mean by this is I have heard there may be an effort to put into the payroll tax agreement a four-year extension of the so-called production tax credit, which is a big tax break for wind developers. I cannot think of anything that would derail more rapidly the consensus that is developing about extending the payroll tax deduction than to do such a thing. We are supposed to be talking about reducing taxes for working people. This would maintain a big loophole for investment bankers, for the very wealthy, and for big corporations.

We hear a lot of talk about federal subsidies for Big Oil. I would like to take a moment to talk about federal subsidies for Big Wind — $27 billion over 10 years. That is the amount of Federal taxpayer dollars between 2007 and 2016, according to the Joint Tax Committee, that taxpayers will have given to wind developers across our country. This subsidy comes in the form of a production tax credit, renewable energy bonds, investment tax credits, federal grants, and accelerated appreciation. These are huge subsidies. The production tax credit itself has been there for 20 years. It was a temporary tax break put in the law in 1992. And what do we get in return for these billions of dollars of subsidies? We get a puny amount of unreliable electricity that arrives disproportionately at night when we don’t need it.

Residents in community after community across America are finding out that these are not your grandma’s windmills. These gigantic turbines, which look so pleasant on the television ads — paid for by the people who are getting all the tax breaks — look like an elephant when they are in your backyard. In fact, they are much bigger than an elephant. They are three times as tall as the sky boxes at Neyland Stadium, the University of Tennessee football stadium in Knoxville. They are taller than the Statue of Liberty. The blades are as wide as a football field is long, and you can see the blinking lights that are on top of these windmills for 20 miles.

In town after town, Americans are complaining about the noise and disturbance that come from these giant wind turbines in their backyards. There is a new movie that was reviewed in the New York Times in the last few days called “Windfall” about residents in upstate New York who are upset and have left their homes because of the arrival of these big wind turbines.

The great American West, which conservationists for a century have sought to protect, has become littered with these giant towers. Boone Pickens, an advocate of wind power, says he doesn’t want them on his own ranch because they are ugly. Senators Kerry, Kennedy, Warner, and Scott Brown have all complained about the new Manhattan Island-sized wind development which will forever change the landscape off the coast of Nantucket Island.

On top of all that, these giant turbines have become a Cuisinart in the sky for birds. Federal law protects the American Eagle and migratory birds. In 2009, Exxon had to pay $600,000 in fines when oil developments harmed these protected birds. But the federal government so far has refused to apply the same federal law to Big Wind that applies to Big Oil, even though chopping up an eagle in a wind turbine couldn’t be any better than its landing and dying on an oil slick. And wind turbines kill over 400,000 birds every year.

We have had some experience with the reliability of this kind of wind power in the Tennessee Valley Authority region. A few years ago TVA built 30 big wind turbines on top of Buffalo Mountain. In the eastern United States, onshore wind power only works when the wind turbines are placed on the ridge lines of Americas most scenic mountains. So you will see them along the areas near the Appalachian Trail through the mountains of scenic views we prize in our State. But there they are, 30 big wind turbines to see whether they would work.

Here is what happened: The wind blows 19 percent of the time. According to TVA’s own estimates, it is reliable 12 percent of the time. So TVA signed a contract to spend $60 million to produce 6 megawatts of wind — actual production of wind — over that 10-year period of time. It was a commercial failure.

There are obviously better alternatives to this. First, there is nuclear power. We wouldn’t think of going to war in sailboats if nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers were available. The energy equivalent of going to war in sailboats is trying to produce enough clean energy for the United States of America with windmills.

The United States uses 25 percent of all the electricity in the world. It needs to be clean, reliable electricity that we can afford. Twenty percent of the electricity that we use today is nuclear power. Nearly 70 percent of the clean electricity, the pollution-free electricity that we use today is nuclear power. It comes from 104 reactors located at 65 sites. Each reactor consumes about one square-mile of land.

To produce the same amount of electricity by windmills would mean we would have to have 186,000 of these wind turbines; it would cover an area the size of West Virginia; we would need 19,000 miles of transmission lines through backyards and scenic areas; so 100 reactors on 100 square miles or 186,000 wind turbines on 25,000 square miles.

Think about it another way. Four reactors on four square miles is equal to a row of 50-story tall wind turbines along the entire 2,178-mile Appalachian Trail. Of course, if we had the turbines, we would still need the nuclear plants or the gas plants or the coal plants because we would like our computers to work and our lights to be on when the wind doesn’t blow, and we can’t store the electricity.

Then, of course, there is natural gas, which has no sulfur pollution, very little nitrogen pollution, half as much carbon as coal. Gas is very cheap today. A Chicago-based utility analyst said: Wind on its own without incentives is far from economic unless gas is north of $6.50 per unit. The Wall Street Journal says that wind power is facing a make-or-break moment in Congress, while we debate to extend these subsidies. So that is why the wind power companies are on pins and needles waiting to see what Congress decides to do about its subsidy.

Taxpayers should be the ones on pins and needles. This $27 billion over 10 years is a waste of money. It could be used for energy research. It could be used to reduce the debt. Let’s start with the $12 billion over that 10 years that went for the production tax credit. That tax credit was supposed to be temporary in 1992.

Today, according to Secretary Chu, wind is a mature technology. Why does it need a credit? The credit is worth about 3 cents per kilowatt hour, if we take into account the corporate tax rate of 35 percent. That has caused some energy officials to say they have never found an easier way to make money. Well, of course not.

So we do not need to extend the production tax credit for wind at a time when we are borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar, at a time when natural gas is cheap and nuclear power is clean and more reliable and less expensive.

I would like to see us put some of that money on energy research. We only spend $5 billion or $6 billion a year on energy research: clean energy research, carbon recapture, making solar cheaper, making electric batteries that go further. I am ready to reduce the subsidies for Big Oil as long as we reduce the subsidies for Big Wind at the same time.

So let’s not even think about putting this tax break for the rich in the middle of an extension of a tax deduction for working Americans this week. Let’s focus on reducing the debt, increasing expenditure for research, and getting rid of the subsidies.

Twenty years is long enough for a wind production tax credit for what our distinguished Nobel Prize-winning Secretary of Energy says is a mature technology.

—Helen Schwiesow Parker, PhD, LCP (Chilmark, Mass.) 3/13/12

In what may well be the biggest defeat for Big Wind around the world in over a decade, the US Senate voted today not to attach the “non-germane” Stabenow amendment #1812 to the Transportation Bill.  Dead in the water!  Done (for now).  And likely done for quite awhile.  Most “in the know” predict that the Transportation Bill is likely the last legislation for the year that will have bipartisan support.

The Production Tax Credits (PTC’s) for wind have expired three times in their 20-year history, and been reinstated each time, but this time we are so much closer to a critical mass of the electorate having learned the truth about Big Wind—it doesn’t work.  It doesn’t reduce carbon emissions; it doesn’t reduce fossil fuel use. And without adequate setbacks, infrasound from turbines makes people sick.

Up against an army of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, tens of thousands of impassioned citizens around the country, with little but truth on our side, stayed apprised of the moment-to-moment specifics throughout the past week, and our voices were heard.  First Big Wind presented the Bennet Amendment #1709, then another version, the Bennet/Moran Amendment #1790.  Then replaced these with another with new language offered by Senator Cantwell (D-WA).  Eventually Senators Reid and McConnell chose to present the Stabenow Amendment #1812 to the full Senate.

#1812 would not only have extended the Production Tax Credit for Big Wind, but would also have resurrected the 1603 credit—the worst of all possibilities.  Big Wind needed 60 votes to attach their self-serving agenda to the BigDaddy S.1813 Surface Transportation Bill.  Instead, they got only 49 votes, less than a majority, a benchmark of sorts.

That’s $5-$20 billion in debt (plus interest) our kids won’t have to pay to the Chinese PLUS billions in savings coming from lower energy costs for the entire economy.  (Is it too much to assume this means Cape Wind is finally off the chart?)

In all events, it is really amazing, almost worthy of miracle status.  For those so inclined, say a prayer of thanks tonight!

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“Oxymoronic Windpower”

—Jon Boone in MasterResource (1/18/11)

“Howler“: A ridiculous idea or proposition, one that elicits howling laughter; also, a type of magic spell from the Harry Potter series.

“Bellyfeel“: A blind, enthusiastic acceptance of an idea, taken from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where any good Oceanian internalizes Party doctrine such that it becomes gut instinct—a feeling in the belly.

“Blackwhite“: In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a word that has two contradictory meanings, used to convey how people have been propagandized to believe that black is white while never realizing that the reverse might be true. It is the ultimate achievement of newspeak that requires a continuous alteration of the past made possible by a system of controlled thought.

Every major claim made by those who would profit, either financially or ideologically, from wind technology is replete with Owellian doublespeak. Despite the promise of many jobs in the USA, for example, wind provides almost no permanent employment, with most wind manufacturing migrating to China.

Despite the bellyfeel assertion that wind is an environmental savior, it is in fact an environmental wrecking ball. Contrary to the proposition wind can back down the coal industry, in most areas of the country it may actually increase coal consumption.

However, nothing about wind is more Orwellian than the very term windpower. Despite its pervasive use and casual acceptance, windpower as a contemporary expression of reality is quite at odds with itself, particularly in technologically advanced societies. It’s a howler.

Widespread misunderstanding about the difference between energy and power has given cover to the charlatan-like wind lobby which pretends their wares provide something they do not. We are all familiar with blackwhite PR jargon that characterizes wind projects as mills, farms, and parks, despite the looming industrial presence of 450-foot tall turbines propelling rotors at tip speeds of nearly 200-mph for many miles along terrain or seabed.

But for sheer oxymoronic audacity, nothing beats the trickeration of the term windpower, since the technology is the very antithesis of modern power performance. In fact, wind provides no modern power. Rather, it throws out spasmodic, highly skittering energy that cannot by itself be converted to modern power.

The basic nature of energy is still not well-understood. We know it exists in both potential and kinetic states. We also know that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, that it is omnipresent, and that it can be changed into many forms. Energy is also intimately related to heat, which in turn is best understood as energy in motion; its behavior is therefore described by the laws of thermo dynamics. Whatever energy turns out to be intrinsically, however, will not diminish our operational definition of it: energy is “fuel” enabling work to be accomplished.

The Power of Machines

All physical systems are essentially machines that convert the energy in fuels to power, the rate at which work gets done. Power is, like interest, work done at a pace in time. All organic systems, from aardvarks to zinnias, from eyeballs to heart valves, must do work—eat, move, hide—to survive and perpetuate. Machines are a means of processing energy to produce power, enabling work over time. Indeed, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett explained in his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, all organisms, including ourselves, are at root machines that convert energy to power, starting from single cell creatures, with mitochondria making ATP from chemicals in their environment, to entities that have evolved, and continue to evolve, into ever more highly complex integrated and convergent machines.

Their basic function is to consume just enough energy (fuel) to maintain their power requirements. Nature is continuously at work keeping this process as efficient as possible. For much of the earth’s history, organisms drew down precisely the energy required for functional power—and no more.

Those organisms that could do more work faster, in the process increasing their power, typically gained a survival advantage. For humans, a man and woman paired together could do more work than could be accomplished by one man working alone. A man, a woman, and a club could do even more. A man, a woman, a club, and a spear could do even more. With the passage of a few million years, humans could reliably feed and shelter hundreds of thousands of their kind, and still find time to build the great pyramids. As Stanley Kubrick showed so masterfully in his film, 2001, our spears have morphed into rockets on the moon.

Our machines, filled with increasingly energy-dense fuels, have given us the ability to do more work faster and faster, begetting an appetitive feedback loop where more power unleashes more time to produce more power.

Why Is This Important?

Imagine how life was lived only nine generations ago, with the modern machines of 1811. For most people, the most effective machine for transportation was two legs walking, fueled by chemicals in the air and water, supplemented by more chemicals in meat and grain. They could, with a lot of exertion, cover 30 miles in a day.

A few could afford to maintain horses, which if placed in teams could carry a coach (which provided some cover from the elements) maybe 60 miles in a day, requiring a lot of oats. Some could get on a boat with sails and harness the hit or miss, tail-wagging-the-dog power of a machine fueled by wind energy, in the process moving across water with some protection from the elements, while saving a lot of energy and risk over and above what was required to swim.

Surely an improvement. But because of the limitations imposed by energy-diffuse fuels and comparatively cumbersome machines, people still typically lived close to where they worked. Those that ventured much beyond expended a great deal of their lives in such an effort, limiting the amount of time they had to do something else.

Contrast that situation with the modern world. An accountant may commute twice daily more than a hundred miles from her home in climate controlled comfort in a machine—built out of hundreds of other convergent machine systems (transmission, steering, braking, internal combustion, lighting, etc) and fueled by energy dense gasoline—and still have time for a game of racquetball, a late dinner, time on the computer, a shower and a chapter of reading before tucking in to sleep.

This is modern power: the ability to predictably and in a controlled fashion shorten the distance in time necessary to perform work. Such power allows people to move from pillar to post on their own schedules. They are no longer dependent upon lumbering, often unreliable machines using energy-thin fuels that typically make people wait upon them. This ability to command power, turning it on and off, up and back, is the hallmark of modern life, a precondition for coordinated economic and social convergence. Machines that are unreliable and uncontrollable, either because of their design or because of the nature of their fuel (energy supply), typically adorn our recreational pursuits, our museums, or, increasingly, our junk piles. They are considered archaic.

Modern power is a time machine, not for moving back and forward in time, but rather expanding the time in which we can do other things. As the scale of power production gets larger, costs become less expensive, making the power more generally available. Modern power has lifted billions of people out of the grind of poverty, improving both quantity and quality of life.

Nowhere is modern power performance more evident than in today’s home, where a battery of machines, each with complementary functions, make not only for convenience but also open up much more time to do other things. Refrigerators work as desired 24/7 for 30 years; ovens and ranges work when asked for 20 years. As do vacuum cleaners, water heaters, furnaces, air conditioners, and a variety of other machines, fueled mainly by electricity.

Modern Power at Its Best

Electricity is a form of power itself produced by an ensemble of complementary machines that dispatch or retract precise amounts of supply to match demand perfectly at all times, maintaining a steady, predictable level of production throughout their operating time except when they are called upon to ramp up or back in response to demand changes.

Like household appliances, each kind of generator has a role to play, some working around the clock, others only upon command. There is much behind-the-scenes tumult involved as many types of conventional generators—coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro—converge at just the right time so that people and industries can be served without fuss or bother at the flip of a switch. By building systems of supply and transmission at large scale, contemporary society keeps costs affordable to all, allowing even the most economically impoverished to make use of their time-saving appliances.

Although all machines convert energy to power, they don’t do so equally. Not all machines convert energy to modern power, which is controllable, predictable, schedulable. Electricity production is modern power at its best—highly reliable, secure, affordable. Not just power production but rather, as energy expert Tom Tanton has said, the quality of the power production, taking into account the frequency, voltage, and harmonics that must be precisely congruent to achieve the reciprocal convergence essential for proactive modern power performance.

Wind machines, even massively tall and wide contemporary turbines, are wholly inimical to modern power quality. They are rarely reliable, by nature randomly intermittent, and, since their power is a function of the cube of the wind speed along a very narrow speed range, they are always variable. No one can know what they will yield at any future interval. They almost never produce their full capacity. In fact, they average over the course of a year about 25% of their full capacity. More than 60% of the time, they produce less than that. About 10-15% of the time, they produce nothing, often at peak demand times. They typically generate most at times of least demand. Whatever they do produce is changing one minute to the next—in the process destabilizing the necessary match between supply and demand, for blackouts occur when there is too little supply while appliances and transmission systems can be damaged if the supply is excessive. Unlike machines that produce modern power, wind is neither dispatchable nor controllable, except when shut down completely.

To see the difference between archaic and modern power more clearly, imagine that gasoline pumps were wind “powered.” Your tank might eventually be filled, but when? How long would it take? How long would the line of cars waiting their turn at the pump be? Would time seem to drag for those drivers, reducing time to do other things? Now imagine government had mandated that gliders, powered only by fuel from the wind, handle, say, 20% of all air passenger transport. How long would a glider’s flight from New York to Los Angeles likely take? And at what cost, since any glider would first have to be towed with conventionally powered aircraft to get into the air, and then picked up where it eventually fluttered to the ground because of insufficient fuel, and then trucked to an air field where it could be towed back into the air, etc, etc–—until it reached its destination

THIS IS NO EXAGGERATION. The diffuse nature of wind’s fuel requires continuous supplementation by reliable machines fueled by more energy-dense fuels, as well as virtually dedicated new transmission lines and voltage regulation systems. It’s the kind and scope of activity that must happen to make wind create modern power.

Backup: A Fly in the Soup

The notion that wind volatility is something in need of “backup” is a minor wind howler. Backup literally means a reserve or substitute for the real thing, often in the form of an understudy or a computer file. Or it can mean support for a much larger object or activity. (Let’s avoid here the notion of backup as a clogged drain.) In the first case, the backup is sufficiently like the original (what is backed up) that performance should not be markedly corrupted. A second-string quarterback should in virtually all-important respects be able to do what the first-string quarterback does. Ditto for an understudy forced into mainline service because of illness to the diva.

In the second case, a backup buttress to an architectural feature plays a small role in the scheme of things, nice for security to be sure, but nonetheless, it is a minor part of the whole. Although it is a proactive measure in terms of ultimate security, it is mainly reactive in function.

The nature of wind variability, which routinely changes its output 5% or more at every five-minute interval and occasionally widely alters what it delivers in a very short time, means that wind is a wayward fish to conventional generation’s bicycle; it is a completely different creature both in degree and kind. Given that wind generates an average of only a fourth of its full capacity annually, nearly 75% of that capacity must therefore consist of conventional generation—in order to keep supply matched to demand. Given that 10-15% of the time it produces nothing, then 100% of its full capacity must be taken over by conventional machines. The truth is that wind can only be a minor ingredient in a much larger fuel mix—but much like a fly in soup, which provides, like wind, problematic nutritional value. You could eat it. But why would you want to?

Given the erratic, skittering nature of its delivery, wind cannot merely be “backed up” by a slightly corrupted version of itself. Quite the contrary. It is as if wind is the whacky substitute requiring the first team, the diva, to make it functional. In the best Orwellian newspeak fashion, it is the backup that does virtually all the important work—but in a much more inefficient fashion. How would the world’s best actor squelch, live onstage, a drunken understudy who continually spoke lines from another play?

Words are important if they are to impart accurate meaning. To say that wind requires backup is to pervert both language and meaning, despite its bellyfeel quality. Although language is slippery, it should not be that quicksilver. Wind machines must always be ENTANGLED with proactive but inefficiently operating conventional machines through the entire extent of any wind machine’s full capacity.

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Wind Howlers, Part II, will later examine how (and why), contrary to the widespread belief that wind is an alternative to fossil fuel, indeed all conventional generation, including hydro and nuclear, the technology is actually deeply embedded in the marketing plans of multinational corporations themselves heavily invested in conventional fuels, including coal.

Editor’s note:  Andreas Marciniak (Australia) wrote the following letter to Tracy Whitworth (Ontario, Canada), in response to “My Name Is Tracy.”
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Hi Tracy,

I’m sorry to hear things are so bad for you and the people in your town.  I and my family have had the same problems here in Australia, in the small town of Waterloo, after they built these Monsters.  Thirty-seven 3MW units on a 18 km ridge overlooking our town.

It took only a few weeks after they turned them on, till things started getting “wired.”  We didn’t put it all together at first, because most of us in the surrounding farms were in favor of this new, clean, cheap energy.  LOL!

My brother had to move after 3 months.  If he had not, he would NOT be here with us today.  His heart specialist told him at last month’s checkup not to go back to his home, not even to go to keep it clean.  He is staying in a caravan (RV) with no power or running water, 25km away from his home.  If he comes within 10km of Waterloo, he starts to feel ill.

I lasted 3 months longer than he did, and it got too much for me.  The headaches became unbearable, and my blood pressure went through the roof.  When my 17-year-old daughter came to stay with me, she began getting headaches from the turbines after being here 3 days, and her blood pressure went so high that I took her to the doctor.  When I told him that I think our problems came from the turbines, he would not believe us, even with the month of medical records I showed him. After looking at the records he said, “I don’t believe it’s from the turbines,” adding, “if you’re better when you’re not at your home, then just move!”

So, I moved my daughter to Adelaide to stay with her sister, and I, too, soon moved to Adelaide.  I live in my mother’s shed, and keep on fighting.

We have been declared a “disaster zone” in and around Waterloo, but all we get (from the government) are the same “stories” as you good people over there, in Canada.

I have lost everything that I worked for, nevertheless I will not stop fighting.  There are a lot of us victims in this big world, so don’t give up!  Every day there is new evidence coming out about how bad these turbines are for health, and how useless they are for producing energy, and NOT Green, and not cheap.

Stay strong and well!

Regards,

Andreas Marciniak

P.S. I’m happy that you’re back online Calvin!  And the new website looks great!

Editor’s note:  The following is a letter from a Wind Turbine Syndrome sufferer in Ontario, to another, Sue Hobart, in Falmouth, Mass.
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Hi Sue,

My name is Tracy.  I know your situation all to well.

My home sits empty in Clear Creek, Ontario.  My life of hell started in the fall of 2008.

Yesterday was a very bad day for us.  Spirits are very low.  My son and I had a discussion just last night.  We talked about people and money; people not caring about others; the humiliation we have felt; the fight that is ahead of us; the scars that will be with us for the rest of our lives.  Like yourself, my government and the wind companies have destroyed my life.  They almost killed me.  I am not out of the woods yet.

I went to my home today—my home where I cannot live.  I still have some of my things there, where I had left them.  I walked the property, looking at the trees I had planted over the years; looking back at a life that no longer exists, or ever will.  It was very sad.  I drove around the township, again surprised at yet another new real estate listing and even more vacated houses.

Approximately one in three houses are empty.  Two of the vacant homes were homes of young families with children.  I was glad they were able to leave.  Others have left; a few have passed on (died).  I consider myself fortunate that my son had the sense to get us out of there.  Today I tolerated half an hour of exposure to low frequencies.  When I left, I had started to become lethargic.  I was dizzy, nauseous.  My head hurt.  I felt such pressure.

Each day is tough.  Last night we also talked about others who had it worse than us; kids who are sick and hungry. When the going gets tough, I remind myself I am warm, I have a place to lay my head and enough food.  I take it one day at a time.  I walk, lots.  I meditate.  It helps.

I attended a meeting with our department of health on Thursday night.  As yourself, my son cannot bring himself to attend any more of these “gong shows.”  I went to support Stephana Johnston and others presenting deputations.  I returned to the place I stay, very upset and angry because of the ignorance displayed by some of the health officials.

A neighbor from home told me last night, I must not give up.  If you give up they win.  Ironically, these are the same words I said to my son just a short time earlier.  I also told him, as others have told you:  he needs to take a time out.  Rest and recharge.  I know, easier said than done

Have faith and comfort knowing there are many who are going to bat for people like us.  Hang in there.  Life may not be the same, but it will get better.

Take care,

Tracy Whitworth

January 23, 2012

Dear Calvin,

Congratulations to your restarting the website!

The Anti-Wind Turbine Movement got back its leading information website!  Thanks!

With all our best wishes to you and Nina and so many thanks for your enormous help.
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Jutta Reichardt & Marco Bernardi
Neuendorf—Sachsenbande (Germany)

“CIVIL RIGHTS ARE OUR MOTIVATION.  NATURE IS OUR ENERGY”

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Sprecherin der EPAW für Deutschland

Europäische Plattform gegen Windkraftanlagen

www.epaw.org

Internationales Informationsportal (IIP)

www.windwahn.de

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Member of:

Save The Eagles International
www.savetheeaglesinternational.org

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Für Mensch und Natur—Gegenwind Schleswig-Holstein

Landesverband der Windkraftgegner

www.gegenwind-sh.de

A review of the literature & discussion of the issues

Editor’s note:  This is an update of the superb literature review done by Frey & Hadden some years back.  We strongly urge you to download this report and read it carefully.  It is rare we give a report such a high recommendation; in our view, this is the finest overview of the literature and knowledge on wind turbine health issues.

Click here to download the PDF.

The above cartoon (if one can call it that) is from an amazing website, FenBeagleBlog.  We have used this without permission, and dearly hope the owner of the blog approves.  We strongly recommend that our readers visit FenBeagle.  It’s dazzling!  It’s absolutely brilliant!

Editor’s note:  The following letter was published by Dr. Pierpont in the Massachusetts newspaper, South Coast Today, responding to a letter written by a Fairhaven, MA, resident named Donald Mulcare, titled  “Pierpont’s wind syndrome study isn’t applicable to Fairhaven” (2/23/12).

“Nope,” replied Pierpont, “you’re wrong, buddy!”

To the editor:

In response to Mr. Donald Mulcare’s letter in this paper on February 23, we need data to support his assertions that (a) there are 15 southern New England communities with active industrial wind turbines, (b) in 14 of these communities there are no health effects or complaints due to the turbines, and (c) Sinovel turbines are somehow different with regard to noise and infrasound generation than the five brands of turbine described in my study or used elsewhere, including New England.

In presuming that Fairhaven citizens will be safe from effects because they will be exposed to only two turbines, Mr. Mulcare dismisses the experience in Falmouth, MA and Vinalhaven, ME, where exposure to 1 to 3 turbines has caused marked health problems.

Be that as it may, I have done Mr. Mulcare’s research for him.

• It’s not valid to compare 1.5 MW turbines with 100 or 250 or 660 kW turbines (which he must have included to reach his total of 15 installations in southern New England), for the simple reason it’s well documented in the scientific literature that the amount of infrasound produced by wind turbines increases the bigger they are (see Møller and Pedersen, Journal of the American Acoustical Society, 2011, vol. 129, p. 3727-44).
• The potential for noise disturbance is not related to the brand of turbine, for the simple reason the disturbing pulsations are aerodynamic, spinning off the blades, rather than coming from the machinery of the gears or generator.  It’s an old industry chestnut to assert, “Oh, those noisy old models—we’re not going to use one of them!”  Every wind turbine salesman says this.  But wait—today’s noisy old models were the new quiet ones of 2004 or 2007!  And I wonder why Mr. Mulcare imagines a rock-bottom Chinese turbine manufacturer is going to turn out a better product than the Americans, Danes or Germans?  (Sinovel is currently being sued for stealing wind turbine software from American Superconductor, a Mass. company, and it operates in a country notorious for its massive and systematic indifference to environmental and humanitarian constraints.)

To help Mr. Mulcare with his data, I made a list of the single to triplet wind turbine installations in southern New England (i.e., Massachusetts and Rhode Island, since Connecticut has none) with turbines in the MW range.  All are 1.5 to 1.8 MW per turbine, while the smaller ones (which I ignore for this exercise) are 660 kW or less.  After making the list, I emailed a number of people in New England who know about wind turbines, asking about complaints or problems.  Call it a “grass-roots research strategy.”

Here are the results:

» Hull Wind Turbine II (1.8 MW):  Complaints have been recorded on videotape.

» Ipswich Wind Farm I (1.6 MW):  Complaints have been lodged with the local government.

» Jiminy Peak Wind (1.5 MW):  Complaints have been lodged with the local government, despite the turbine being in a ski area.

» Massachusetts Military Reservation (3 x 1.5 MW):  There are known complaints.

» Mount Wachusett Community College (2 x 1.65):  No complaints known.

» NOTUS Wind I, Falmouth, MA (1.65 MW) and Town of Falmouth Wind I (1.65 MW):  Well-known health effects documented in medical interviews by me on community TV.

» Princeton Wind Farm Project (2 x 1.5 MW):  There are known complaints, despite the turbines being in a ski area.

» Templeton Wind Turbine (1.65 MW):  There are known complaints. The turbine is next to a high school and middle school.

» Town of Portsmouth, RI, Wind Turbine (1.5 MW):  There are known complaints.  The turbine is next to a high school.

» Fall River Philips Wind Turbine (2 MW):  Only up a few weeks; won’t generate till spring.

I count 9 wind turbine installations comparable to the planned pair of 1.5 MW turbines in Fairhaven (not counting Fall River).  Eight out of 9 have known complaints.  Even calling all 9 “comparable” is a stretch, since 2 sets are off on mountaintops, though still within a mile of homes.

Many of the smaller single turbines in Massachusetts have also generated complaints, including those in Barnstable, Bourne, Dennis, Hull, Nantucket (where one turbine broke apart in moderate winds and another has provoked complaints), Newburyport, and Woods Hole.

A far cry from “14 out of 15” being unaffected.  I guess it depends on who you ask.

Mr. Mulcare, who did you ask?  Even if it were just 1 out of 15 affected, as you argue, would that be okay?  What about 1 out of 15 people?  Just roadkill, collateral damage, a few eggs broken while making the omelette?  Since it’s only a small part of the “general population,” you can tolerate that?  Just a few of your neighbors driven out of their homes—but not too many?

Mr. Mulcare, anyone with migraines in your family, or inner ear problems, motion sensitivity, or advanced age?  You say you’ve read the book; these are the proven risk factors.  Every disease on the planet affects some people more than others.  There are, I assure you, susceptible people in your community, too.

What if, Mr. Mulcare—it’s you or your family?

The following was a video-conference presentation in Shelburne Falls, Mass., January 28, 2012
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Nina Pierpont, MD (Johns Hopkins), PhD (Princeton: Population Biology/Ecology), Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, former Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University (NY)

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I’m going to start with a difficult word, one I struggled with in college: the word is epistemology. I could never remember what it meant then, but it’s an important word to me now. It means how we know things—what we accept as real, as true—what we trust as evidence, and what we do with that evidence.

Epistemology is a framework or set of assumptions for reality, a framework into which we fit data. Every day, all of us throw out data that doesn’t fit our assumptions. I have patients who tell me they see ghosts and UFOs, but give me no other evidence that they’re psychotic. I have to put this information on hold—in a sort of suspended state—because they believe it and I don’t. There’s no part of my reality box or set of assumptions that can accommodate it.

On the other hand, I have patients who tell me that painful sensations from their GI tracts affect their mental state—causing anxiety, depression, and agitation—rather than the mental state causing the GI problems, as other doctors have told them.

Unlike these other doctors, this does fit my reality box, because I know there are autonomic stretch and vibration receptors around the internal organs that are anatomically linked in the brain to anxiety centers. I’ve been able to successfully treat these patients, unlike these other doctors. In response to unusual symptom states that my patients tell me about, it’s my job to read the medical literature to expand my knowledge of how the body works.

When patients talk to me, I take seriously and believe the symptoms and observations they present, especially when I see evidence that the observer—the patient—is thoughtful and alert. My job is to provide the explanation, which becomes a working hypothesis for how to treat the problem within a physiologic or neurophysiologic framework.

I studied and described Wind Turbine Syndrome with the same set of assumptions about clinical truth and reality that I apply to my patients. (more…)