Editor’s note:  Watch this 20-minute video of testimony by a man named Cary Shineldecker.  The Shineldecker home, in Michigan, is surrounded by industrial wind turbines (IWT’s).  In the video, Mr. Shineldecker (an engineer) painstakingly and courteously explains to the wind developer, an outfit named Consumers Energy, how it systematically violated and ultimately pulverized his family’s home and life.

What I just wrote may seem “over the top”:  systematic violation and pulverized.  It’s not.  Watch the video.  You will be left  speechless and seething.   Twenty minutes of nightmare, as this man methodically piles up documented fact after fact.

Editor’s note:  I have edited the following poem, which originally was three poems.  Read and grieve over this, a tale repeated the world over.

“Under the Turbines”

— M. Krochmalnik  Grabois

Infants and toddlers can’t speak
and even pre-teens
may not have vocabulary to describe
what they suffer

Teenagers can tell you more—
they are developing a vocabulary of suffering
beginning to see how life is unfair
fraught with strife

Even if they feel invincible
they watch parents and know
invincibility is a lie

They watch landscape transform around them
watch five-hundred-foot turbines go up

Where the sound of gears way up there
is unlike the sound
of childhood swings
that creak in the wind at night
— a comforting sound

The sound they hear now is the
whoosh of the wealthy
robbing them
even before they have acquired
anything

……………….

Interrupted sleep in children is common
a child may feel bullied
even though no classmate bullies him

He has just begun to understand that
monsters beneath the bed
don’t exist

Now he awakens sensing an intruder
roaming the house
— the monster with weapons
more powerful than guns
— knowing father is helpless
against the larger forces of this world

Of course it’s true
father tried to stop the turbines
pointing out the Comprehensive Plan
forbade them

Now, he’s powerless

………………….

I watch my sleeping daughter
grit her teeth

When she was three she suffered
earaches and took antibiotics
— so many, the doctor
forbade us giving her milk
since milk is laced with them
(and we can’t afford organic)

Now they are back
and her doctor says there’s no cure
except fleeing the “wind farm”

It’s the pressure, he says
and because of her history she’s
susceptible

Each of us fingers our vulnerabilities
anxiety, nervousness—
I’ve learned the difference between the two
though when I panic awake with racing heart
I’m not sure which is which

And nausea
I’ve always eaten well and never been
nauseous in my life.  Now
I am
always

I puzzle over wind turbines creating nausea
— am told it’s an inner ear disturbance
something my daughter and I
share

My neighbor the professor stands
in front of his chalkboard
gripping the edges of the podium
staring at notes

He’s got vertigo and can’t
pace his classroom and
speak extemporaneously, he tells me,
like he used to

I never much liked him
(kind of self-important)
he moved here from the city
for peace and quiet

Laughable, ain’t it, professor?
Now I feel more charitable
we two stood up in public hearings
as our arguments and pleas were
ignored by corrupt politicians
— him with PhD, me with
high school diploma

(Somehow, it makes me think
I was smart not to go to college, though
my mother told me
I was smart enough,
— for this?)

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“Hostages to a Renewable Ruse”

— Nick Cater, The Australian (7/29/14)

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The power couple.

If there is a sound more pitiable than the whine of a pious environmental activist, it is the wail of a financier about to do his dough.

The mournful chorus now wafting from Greg Hunt’s waiting room is the sound of the two in unison, pleading with the Environment Minister to save the life of their misshapen bastard child, the renewable energy target.

You have to hand it to Hunt, who either has nerves of steel or is stone deaf, for he has retained both his cool and his fortitude.

The RET review by Dick Warburton on the government’s behalf has brought the rent-seekers out in force, for billions of dollars of corporate welfare is resting on its outcome.

As it stands, the RET will produce a bounteous return for a small group of investors shrewd enough to get into the windmill game while the rest of us are slapped with four-figure power bills.

Wind farms may be ugly but they are certainly not cheap, nor is the electricity that trickles from them. No one in their right minds would buy one if they had to sell power for $30 to $40 a megawatt hour, the going rate for conventional producers.

But since the retailers are forced to buy a proportion of renewable power, the windmill mafia can charge two to three times that price, a practice that in any other market would be known as price gouging.

As if a $60 premium were not reward enough, the transaction is further sweetened with a renewable energy certificate that they can sell to energy producers who insist on generating power in a more disreputable manner.

The going rate of $40 a megawatt hour means the total income per megawatt for wind farms is three to five times that of conventional power, and unless the government changes the scheme that return is only going to get better.

In an act of rent-seeking genius, the renewable lobby managed to persuade the Rudd government to set the 2020 target as a quantity — 41 terawatt hours — rather than 20 per cent of over-all power as originally proposed.

Since the target was set, the energy generation forecast for 2020 has fallen substantially, meaning the locked-in renewable target is now more like 28 per cent.

That will send conventional producers scrambling for certificates, pushing up their price beyond $100. It’s a mouth-watering prospect for the merchant bankers and venture capitalists who were smart enough to jump on board, and brilliant news for Mercedes dealerships on the lower north shore, but of little or any benefit to the planet.

The cost of this speculative financial picnic will be about $17 billion by 2030 or thereabouts, according to Deloitte, which produced a report on the messy business last week.

Since the extra cost will be added to electricity bills, the RET is a carbon tax by another name, a regressive impost that will fall most heavily on those with limited incomes, such as pensioners.

The lowest income house- holds already spend 7 per cent of their disposable incomes on energy, according to the Australian Council of Social Service. Energy takes just 2.6 per cent of the budget of those on high incomes.

Thus under the cover of responding to climate change — “the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time” — billions of dollars are taken from the poor and given to the rich investors in the unsightly industrial turbines that are blighting the lives of rural communities and stripping value from the properties of people who just wish to be left to live in peace.

If the anti-Abbott budget bashers who are squealing about a minor adjustment to pension indexation were serious, they would demand the end of the RET’s iniquitous transfer of wealth.

Yet ironically they find themselves on the side of crafty merchant bankers in the romantic expectation that this complex financial ruse is doing something to assist the planet.

To speak up in opposition to this social injustice is to find oneself condemned as a climate change denier, right-wing ideologue, apologist for the coal industry or, worse still, to be ignored altogether, as the ABC’s Four Corners managed to do in its renew- able energy special last month.

The corporation flew reporter Stephen Long to California to tell us how wonderful the renewable energy bonanza is going to be and how foolish Tony Abbott’s government is to even question the proposition that too many windmills are barely enough.

“This government has an ideological agenda,” insisted John Grimes, chief executive of the Australian Solar Council.

“They want to carve out the impact of renewable energy on the network and they want to stop renewals in their tracks.”

Jeremy Rifkin, author of a book called The Third Industrial Revolution, told Long: “Australia’s the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy. There’s so much sun; there’s so much wind off the coast, and so it makes absolutely no sense when you have an abundance of renewable energy, why would you rely on a depleting supply of fossil fuels with all of the attendant consequences to society and the planet?”

Fatuous arguments of this kind are rarely challenged on the ABC, nor are the purveyors of renewable energy subjected to the degree of scepticism that others with corporate vested interests can expect. Instead they find themselves in the company of a cheer squad.

“The new developments with renewable energy and storage seem to have passed the Prime Minister by,” Long editorialised halfway through his dispiriting report.

Finally, however, as Long was about to run out of time and throw back to Kerry O’Brien, he let slip the awkward truth he had managed so far to avoid.

“Yes, it costs money to create the infrastructure for renewable energy,” he says. “A lot of money.”

Indeed it does, and if the arbitrary, inefficient and regressive mechanism of the RET is all that is left to overcome that hurdle, we may as well give up.

It is through this complicated method that the consumers are forced to pay a subsidy to wind farms without the need for a carbon tax.

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“Celebrate! Australia’s carbon [dioxide] tax is gone!”

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— Australian Climate Madness (7/17/14)  Click here & here to read about Australian Climate Madness, a worthy blog.  Click here for commentary in The Spectator.

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Editor’s note:  On the face of it, this story has nothing to do with wind energy.  But that’s just on the face of it.  In truth the story has everything to do with everything, including who we are and who the universe is.  I use a personal “who” instead of “what.”  For it seems to me that, regardless of whether one thinks of the universe as a god (capitalized or not) or simply a great, patient, inexhaustible intelligence — that “who” fits better than “what.”

I offer this NY Times video as a way of putting our lives, and even this campaign, into perspective.  It’s the biggest perspective of all.  All of us, me included, risk imagining that our thoughts, along with those of humanity at large, are front and center, paramount above everything else.  A story like this corrects such hubris.

Behold the scaffolding of the cosmos.  The shadow universe — a spidery web of matter we can’t see — existing alongside the one we do perceive.  “Dark matter” isn’t just out there in the abyss we call outer space; it’s intimate, it’s personal — a shadow self of you and me.

The poet John Donne, wrote Loren Eiseley, “recognized that behind visible nature lurks an invisible and procreant void from whose incomprehensible magnitude we can only recoil” (Eiseley, “The Unexpected Universe,” p. 31).

Recoil?  Maybe.  Personally, I find it thrilling.

Click here for the related article.

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I do not like green blades with spans
I do not like them, mad I am

I do not like them on the roads
I do not like them in the rows

I do not like them standing tall
I do not like them, not at all

I do not like them killing birds
I do not like them killing bats

I do not like them causing harm
I do not like them on a farm

I do not like them — Do No Harm
I do not like them false green farms

I do not like the spinning blades, noise, flicker, insane rage
I do not like them on this page

I do not like these giant fans 
I do not like them on the lands

I do not like those men in ties
I do not like those telling lies

I do not like them on the ground 
I do not like them dead birds found

I do not like those concrete holes
Where toxic water then must flow

I do not like them in the sun
I do not like them in the rain

I do not like them in the snow
I do not like them, they must go!

I do not like them any day 
They harm us all in every way

I do not like them in the north
I do not like them in the south

I do not like them east or west
I do not like them, Can you guess?

I do not like green blades with spans
with giant sweeps upon our lands

In Germany Australia Netherlands Canada USA or UK
Take your fans and blow away!

I do not like green blades with spans
I do not like them, Mad I Am

— Ella Rupprecht

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— Curt Devlin, Guest Editor, Massachusetts (7/12/14)

“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” cautioned Mark Twain.  Miles Grant heeded Twain’s famous advice in his recent opinion about global climate change and wind opposition. Grant burns with evangelical fervor when he argues that wind power is necessary for averting climate change.

The problem with the argument is it assumes facts that don’t exist. Wind turbines do not reduce CO2 emission, they increase it. In 2013, the U.S. spent some $80B subsidizing wind power, but CO2 only increased. In proportion to their economies, other industrialized nations around the world have invested far more heavily in wind energy than the U.S., but carbon emissions still go up.

Coal supplies roughly 60% of the energy to the world’s power grids, and all industrial turbines must be connected to a grid. Grid operators maintain an instantaneous balance between energy supply and demand. When turbines are spinning, coal generators are ramped down to balance the grid, a process known as “curtailment.”  When turbines stop spinning, coal plants are ramped up, called “cycling” — a procedure that can take hours, since coal plants ramp up slowly.

The problem with cycling is that even the most efficient coal plants produce much greater CO2 emissions when they are not running at peak efficiency. This means that wind farms connected to coal grids virtually ensure increased CO2 emissions — not to mention increased particulate air pollution, a dirty little secret the “wind” lobby doesn’t want you to know.

Grant mentioned the people who have to breathe the pollutants being belched out of the Brayton Point coal plant, but forgets to mention that connecting wind turbines to the same grid will make matters worse. The misguided demonstrators who marched into Fairhaven last year to support the turbines, clearly didn’t understand this danger. The people being harmed by pollution from this coal plant should be doing everything to prevent further turbines from being connected to the same grid.

Brayton Point Power Station, a coal-fired power plant located in Somerset, MA.

People like Grant, who look at wind power through green-tinted glasses, are quick to argue that at least coal is not being burned when turbines generate power. Unfortunately, this too falls apart under careful scrutiny. The U.S. has become an exporter of its coal surplus. The principal consumer of our surplus is China. When the Chinese burn our coal, however, their plants don’t have to comply with EPA standards. As a result of these dirty coal plants, some industrialized cities in China now have pollution so bad that the air is unbreathable for days on end.

At least we can all agree on one thing; the climate is global, so we’re all inhaling some of this pollution.

The results of burning coal in China

Here are some other facts the green evangelists don’t want you to know. Every living plant growing in huge swaths of land is literally razed to the ground every time a wind turbine goes up. It isn’t just the ten acres needed for the site that get turned into a moonscape. Broad fire lanes and paved roads are often cut across ridges and mountain tops to accommodate the huge vehicles needed to build, service, and maintain these leviathans. The forest habitat is virtually hacked to ribbons, so it can no longer support the complex, balanced ecology of flora and fauna. (Take a look at the wind farms in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine with Google Earth to see the true extent of environmental destruction cause by industrial turbines.)

Aerial shot of the Groton Wind Project in New Hampshire. (Click for a full tour of the ecological devastation.)

Another impact that Mr. Green Eggs & Ham won’t mention is the economic one. In the U.K., wind power has driven the cost of retail electricity so high that a new class of poverty has emerged. More and more people are slipping below the poverty line, because they can no longer afford the high cost of electricity produced by turbines. In the global economy, the worst impact is placed on those who are already languishing in poverty.

In proportion to its economy, Germany has invested more in wind than any other industrialized nation. Once the powerhouse of the E.U., its economy has been decimated by its gamble on the roulette wheel of wind. According to government-paid researchers, the wind energy misadventure known as the Energiewende (energy transformation) has damaged the German economy so badly that Germans are bringing ten new coal generators online, with more on the way.

The $6-million-dollar turbines in Princeton, MA.

Princeton, MA, one of the earliest adopters of wind power in Massachusetts, has now reported a loss of $6 million, and has the highest electric rates in the Commonwealth.

Though the cost of wind energy is hidden by federal subsidies paid for with your tax dollars, a kilowatt of energy from a land-based turbine costs three times more to produce than conventional generators; and from offshore turbines, three times more than that, again. If Cape Wind is ever built in Nantucket Sound, carbon emissions will continue to rise and Massachusetts will have the highest electric rates in the U.S.

By far the greatest cost of all is the human one. There is no benefit to wind power sufficient to justify the damage to human health and well-being they cause. Wind turbine sites are ecological dead zones. The best science we have offers clear evidence that virtually everyone exposed to the pulsed volleys of infrasound produced by industrial wind turbines will begin to suffer from cognitive impairment or cardiovascular disease. Turbines are a silent killer.

“Lasciate onge speranza, voi ch’ingrate.” “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”  Dante’s inscription over the gates of Hell (“The Inferno”).

Contrary to green dogma, wind power doesn’t make sense, whether you believe global climate change is real or not. In the end, the fantasy-in-green doesn’t amount to even a good story. It’s but a fractured fairy tale, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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“All my female employees are complaining of irregular menstruations, and several have permanent headaches” (Boye Jensen, Nursery Owner, Denmark)

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— Mark Duchamp, Chairman, World Council for Nature (7/10/14)

The Danish press reports the case of a garden centre (nursery) going out of business because of nearby wind turbines. Headaches are frequent among employees, and female workers complain of unusual bleeding and problems with their menstrual cycles. They are worried that more serious illnesses may follow.  Five have recently resigned. The owner is now closing his business for fear of being held liable should a child be born with deformities, as happened to numerous mink puppies at a fur farm near wind turbines in Jutland.¹

Boye Jensen, the owner of Lammefjordens Perennials, is 67. He started his nursery 43 years ago and it became a prosperous business with 15 employees and annual sales of 12 million krones (equiv. $ 2.1 million). He was planning to continue working for another 6-7 years, then sell the nursery. But his business is now worth nothing, creating an enormous financial loss.

He is discussing with his lawyer whether to sue Vattenfal, the company that owns the wind turbines, or the Municipality of Holbaek, which approved their installation 400-700 metres from his nursery. He expects to go to court and seek damages of several million krones.

“Himself a neighbour to 127-metre high wind turbines since their installation three years ago, Boye Jensen has long been convinced that low frequency noise emitted by the turbines makes people ill, as they do animals.”² Then, recently, he heard the tragic news from Kaj Bank Olesen’s mink farms.¹  This, along with the resignation of several of his employees for health reasons, made him realise his business had become untenable because of the wind turbines. “The nursery owner made this hard decision after a mink breeder in Jutland was able to establish a causal link between the loss of a third of his mink puppies, deformed or stillborn, and several giant wind turbines erected nearby.”²

The story made the news in Denmark,^2,3 and Member of Parliament Karina Adsbøl expressed her concerns to the Minister of Health at a parliamentary hearing.  The Minister, typically, replied by addressing other, less important issues mentioned by the MP, and ignoring the important ones, i.e. wind turbines causing birth defects in animals forced to live near them, and disrupting women’s menstrual cycles.⁴

The World Council for Nature (WCFN) is calling attention to the fact that, as occurred for tobacco, asbestos, thalidomide, etc., governments are siding with private financial interests in ignoring or denying the existence of obvious health problems linked to wind turbines. As is the case for the millions of birds and bats killed yearly by the turbines’ blades, mendacious studies are published by unscrupulous consultants, and by professionals and universities happy to oblige their benefactors. Hypocrisy is rampant, species are fast disappearing from our skies, and thousands of windfarm neighbours are being submitted to torture. The word “torture” is not an exaggeration: sleep deprivation is indeed a recognised form of torture.

In Denmark, as elsewhere in the world, many rural families are suffering, particularly since the manufacture of the mega turbines (1 MW and over), which emit more infrasound as they grow bigger. This may explain why the complaints are growing louder. How much longer can this suffering be ignored, or even denied by health authorities?

Some countries, including Canada and Australia, have commissioned studies into the matter of noise emitted by windfarms. But the studies’ scope and methodology doom them to failure, perhaps intentionally. What is really needed is:

• an epidemiological study, and
• the measurement of low frequency sound (including infrasound down to 0.1 Hz) inside the homes of windfarm victims, at night, windows closed, when the wind is blowing from the direction that causes the problem.

Most of all, as a precaution, no mega turbines should be erected less than 10 km from habitations until these studies are completed, published and analysed. There is indeed compelling evidence that infrasound travels much farther than other noise, and tortures sensitive people in their homes at distances of 10 km and more. Shorter distances could be temporarily set for smaller turbines, in proportion to their generating capacity.

WCFN calls upon the Danish government to intervene in favour of victims. A wealth of evidence is available, including peer-reviewed studies, that warrants applying the precautionary principle without delay.⁵  Children are particularly at risk — evidently even the unborn.

WCFN’s primary goal is the conservation of biodiversity. A sane and responsible human population is the single most important means of achieving this goal. A letter of protest is being sent to the Danish government.

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References:

1.  Kaj Bank Olesen’s mink farm, stillbirths and deformities: http://wcfn.org/2014/06/07/windfarms-1600-miscarriages/

2.  Translation of the article from the Nordvestnyt (North West News) on the closing of the garden center:  http://wcfn.org/documents/wind-turbines-affect-menstruation-danish-press/

3.  Garden centre story mentioned in one of Denmark’s leading newswpaper, Jyllands-Posten (the Jutland Post):  http://jyllands-posten.dk/opinion/breve/ECE6846968/mink-som-forsoegsdyr/

4.  Video.  Member of Parliament, Karina Adsbøl, addresses her concerns to the Minister of Health, describing the deformities at the mink farm and the menstrual problems at the nursery:  http://wcfn.org/documents/windfarms-affect-menstruation-danish-parliament/

5.  Waubra Foundation:  http://waubrafoundation.org.au/

»»»»»»

Editor’s note:  The following is the Danish source for the above article.  It was published in the print edition of the Danish newspaper, Nordvestnyt (North West News), 7/3/14.  It was translated into English by Greta Gallandy-Jakobsen.

Click here for the original, and here for another Danish version of the same story, and here for our source of the English translation by Ms. Gallandy-Jakobsen.

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“Giant wind turbines close down plant nursery”

For almost three years, now, 10 giant wind turbines at Lammefjord near Gislinge have blown plenty of power to the energy company Vattenfall and to consumers. But now they have also blown away a 43 year old plant nursery and its 15 employees, which had annual sales of 12 million krones [2.1 million dollars].

The owner of Lammefjordens Perennials, Boye Jensen, has chosen to close his nursery almost entirely, located as it is within 400-700 meters of three wind turbines. There will just be a few employees left, and they will work only occasionally. The owner made this hard decision after a mink breeder in Jutland was able to establish a causal link between the loss of a third of his mink puppies, deformed or stillborn, and several giant wind turbines erected nearby.

Himself a neighbour to 127-metre high wind turbines since their installation three years ago, Boye Jensen has long been convinced that low frequency noise emitted by the turbines makes people ill, as they do animals. “When the mink case became known to the public, five of my staff resigned. You have to know that all my female employees have been complaining of irregular menstruations, and several workers have permanent headaches.  They are also afraid of getting chronic illnesses, and I don’t want to be responsible for one of them giving birth to a deformed child. So, I am shutting down my life-long enterprise.”

Boye Jensen’s big problem is that the authorities are still not sure that giant wind turbines make people sick, and it is uncertain whether he can get compensation. But the 67-year-old nursery owner is going for a compensation in the millions. “I am closing my business because of the turbines. Otherwise I would have continued for 6-7 years, and then I would have put the nursery on the market. But now the property is unsalable.  First, together with my lawyer, we need to find out whom we will take to court: Vattenfall, which own the turbines, or the municipality of Holbæk, which approved their installation.”

In Holbæk, Mayor Soren Kjærsgaard is sad that Lammefjordens Perennials are now withering away into nothing. But he is not worried about a lawsuit for damages. “We have tried to help Lammefjordens Perennials by getting a medical officer from the national health administration, as well as the Ministry of Public Health, to look into the matter. But the municipality has no legal ground for stepping in. The windfarm legislation sets very clearly what may and may not be done, and Vattenfall has been complying with noise limits.

End of translation:  Original article in Danish (print edition), in PDF format: Kæmpevindmøller lukker planteskole på Lammefjorden The first part of the article is available online, in Danish:“The owner of the nursery at Gislinge fear for its employees’ health because of low frequency noise from wind turbines.”  The story is also mentioned in the Jyllands-Posten, one of Denmark’s three leading newspapers.

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Editor’s note:  Rick James is, without doubt, one of North America’s premier experts on wind turbine noise.  Unlike the great majority of noise engineers who have sold their souls and ethics to the wind energy industry, Mr. James can’t be “bought.”  Together with Rob Rand and Steve Ambrose, Rick has exposed the deceit and mendacity of wind company acoustic consultants — as in their fraudulent use of A-weighted noise measurements, for instance.

We all owe these three gentlemen a huge debt of gratitude.

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Editor’s note:  The following is a letter Dr. Pierpont wrote to a group in Turkey that’s trying to keep wind turbines out of its community.  (Click here for a PDF.)  We are told the wind developer has been ordered by a court to stop building the turbines.  Being Turkey, the developer has brazenly ignored the court order — and is proceeding full steam ahead.  (So much for the “rule of law.”)

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To:  Ms. Kabadayi-Whiting, Cesme, Turkey
From:  Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD
Regarding:  The proper siting of wind turbines
Date:  June 30, 2014

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I write to you at the request of Madeleine Kura, who tells me the lovely, seaside town of Cesme is about to get half a dozen 3 MW industrial wind turbines built on the edge of town, a mere 500 m from people’s homes. (I’m told that at least one of the turbines will be 300 m from a school.)  Furthermore, all this construction will be in hilly terrain.

Let me explain, clinically, why this is a bad idea. In 2009 I published what was then the definitive study of health effects caused by wind turbine infrasound on people living within 2 km of industrial turbines. The book, “Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment” (K-Selected Books), included 60 pages of raw data in the form of case histories (using case cross-over studies), demonstrating that living in proximity to wind turbines dys-regulates the inner ear vestibular organs controlling balance, position, and spatial awareness. Effectively, sufferers experience symptoms of sea-sickness, along with several related pathologies.

It turns out all this has been well known since the 1980s, when the US Department of Energy commissioned a report on wind turbine health effects — the report subsequently published by physicist Dr. N D Kelley and his colleagues at the Solar Research Institute in Golden, Colorado, bearing the title, “A Methodology for Assessment of Wind Turbine Noise Generation,” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, v. 104 (May 1982), pp. 112-120.

In this paper we have presented evidence to support the hypothesis that one of the major causal agents responsible for the annoyance of nearby residents by wind turbine noise is the excitation of highly resonant structural and air volume modes by the coherent, low-frequency sound radiated by large wind turbines.

Further, there is evidence that the strong resonances found in the acoustic pressure field within rooms [in people’s homes] . . . indicates a coupling of sub-audible energy [infrasound] to human body resonances at 5, 12, and 17-25 Hz, resulting in a sensation of whole-body vibration (p. 120).

I discovered the same thing in my research. What Kelly et al. refer to as a “sensation of whole-body vibration,” I refer to as Visceral Vibratory Vestibular Disturbance (VVVD): “The internal quivering, vibration, or pulsation and the associated complex of agitation, anxiety, alarm, irritability, tachycardia, nausea, and sleep disturbance together make up what I refer to as Visceral Vibratory Vestibular Disturbance (VVVD)” (Wind Turbine Syndrome, p. 59).

Five years later, Dr. Kelley gave a follow-up paper at the Windpower ’87 Conference & Exposition in San Francisco, titled “A Proposed Metric for Assessing the Potential of Community Annoyance from Wind Turbine Low-Frequency Noise Emissions.”  Just so you understand the terminology, “emissions” means “noise & vibration.”  And the term “low frequency” includes infrasound.  And the antiseptic phrase “community annoyance” is code for Wind Turbine Syndrome — except the name had not been coined in1987.  (I  created it decades later.)  Kelley’s research once again had been funded by the US Department of Energy, Contract No. DE-AC02-83CH10093.

We electronically simulated three interior environments resulting from low-frequency acoustical loads radiated from both individual turbines and groups of upwind and downwind turbines. . . .

Experience with wind turbines has shown that it is possible . . . for low-frequency acoustic noise radiated from the turbine rotor to interact with residential structures of nearby communities and annoy the occupants. . . .

The modern wind turbine radiates its peak sound power (energy) in the very low frequency range, typically between 1 and 10 Hz [i.e., infrasound]. . . .

Our experience with the low-frequency noise emissions from a single, 2 MW MOD-1 wind turbine demonstrated that . . . it was possible to cause annoyance within homes in the surrounding community with relatively low levels of LF-range [low frequency range] acoustic noise.  An extensive investigation of the MOD-1 situation revealed that this annoyance was the result of a coupling of the turbine’s impulsive low-frequency acoustic energy into the structures of some of the surrounding homes. This often created an annoyance environment that was frequently confined to within the home itself (p. 1, emphasis in original).

I am attaching a copy of Kelley’s 1987 paper.

Besides my research, which pretty much duplicates Kelley’s, there is the work of Dr. Alec Salt, Professor of Otolaryngology in the School of Medicine at Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri), where he is director of the Cochlear Fluids Research Laboratory. Professor Salt is a highly respected neuro-physiologist specializing in inner ear disorders and in particular the mysteries of the cochlea.

Prof. Salt’s research dovetails with mine and with Dr. Kelley’s. For many years, acousticians and noise engineers have vigorously maintained that “if you can’t hear it, it can’t hurt you.”  That is to say in the case of wind turbines, “If you can’t hear the low-frequency noise in the infrasound range, it can’t hurt you.” (lnfrasound, by definition, is noise below the hearing threshold, typically pegged at 20 Hz and lower. People feel infrasound in various parts of the body, though typically they cannot hear it.) In any case, Professor Salt and his colleagues have demonstrated conclusively, definitively, that infrasound does in fact disturb the very fine hair cells of the cochlea.

With this discovery, one of the main arguments advanced by the wind energy industry — namely, that wind turbine infrasound was too low to be harmful to people, since they could not hear it — was demolished. Prof. Salt has proven that, “If you can’t hear it, it can still harm you.”

This past winter, Professor Salt and his colleague, Professor Lichtenhan, published “How Does Wind Turbine Noise Affect People?” Acoustics Today, v. 10 (Winter 2014), pp. 20-28. The following is a lengthy excerpt:

The essence of the current debate is that on one hand you have the well-funded wind industry (1) advocating that infrasound be ignored because the measured levels are below the threshold of human hearing, allowing noise levels to be adequately documented through A-weighted sound measurements; (2) dismissing the possibility that any variants of wind turbine syndrome exist (Pierpont 2009) even when physicians (e.g., Steven D. Rauch, M.D. at Harvard Medical School) cannot otherwise explain some patients’ symptoms; and (3) arguing that it is unnecessary to separate wind turbines and homes based on prevailing sound levels.

On the other hand, you have many people who claim to be so distressed by the effects of wind turbine noise that they cannot tolerate living in their homes. Some move away, either at financial loss or bought-out by the turbine operators. Others live with the discomfort, often requiring medical therapies to deal with their symptoms. Some, even members of the same family, may be unaffected. Below is a description of the disturbance experienced by a woman in Europe we received a few weeks ago as part of an unsolicited e-mail.

From the moment that the turbines began working, I experienced vertigo-like symptoms on an ongoing basis. In many respects, what I am experiencing now is actually worse than the ‘dizziness’ I have previously experienced, as the associated nausea is much more intense. For me the pulsating, humming, noise that the turbines emit is the predominant sound that I hear and that really seems to affect me.

While the Chief Scientist [the person who came to take sound measurements in her house] undertaking the measurement informed me that he was aware of the low frequency hum the turbines produced (he lives close to a wind farm himself, and had recorded the humming noise levels indoors in his own home) he advised that I could tune this noise out and that any adverse symptoms I was experiencing were simply psychosomatic. . . .

Given the knowledge that the ear responds to low frequency sounds and infrasound, we knew that comparisons with benign sources were invalid and the logic to A-weight sound measurements was deeply flawed scientifically. . . .

From this understanding we conclude that very low frequency sounds and infrasound, at levels well below those that are heard, readily stimulate the cochlea. Low frequency sounds and infrasound from wind turbines can therefore stimulate the ear at levels well below those that are heard. . . .

No one has ever evaluated whether tympanostomy tubes alleviate the symptoms of those living near wind turbines. From the patient’s perspective, this may be preferable to moving out of their homes or using medical treatments for vertigo, nausea, and/or sleep disturbance. The results of such treatment, whether positive, negative, would likely have considerable scientific influence on the wind turbine noise debate….

Another concern that must be dealt with is the development of wind turbine noise measurements that have clinical relevance. The use of A-weighting must be reassessed as it is based on insensitive, Inner Hair Cell (IHC)-mediated hearing and grossly misrepresents inner ear stimulation generated by the noise. In the scientific domain, A-weighting sound measurements would be unacceptable when many elements of the ear exhibit a higher sensitivity than hearing. The wind industry should be held to the same high standards. Full-spectrum monitoring, which has been adopted in some reports, is essential. . . .

Given the present evidence, it seems risky at best to continue the current gamble that infrasound stimulation of the ear stays confined to the ear and has no other effects on the body. For this to be true, all the mechanisms we have outlined (low frequency-induced amplitude modulation, low frequency sound-induced endolymph volume changes, infrasound stimulation of type II afferent nerves, infrasound exacerbation of noise-induced damage and direct infrasound stimulation of vestibular organs) would have to be insignificant. We know this is highly unlikely and we anticipate novel findings in the coming years that will influence the debate.

I suspect you are beginning to get a clear picture of the problem — and why I’m writing to you.

The typical symptoms of what is now known worldwide as Wind Turbine Syndrome are: sleep disturbance, headache, tinnitus (ringing or buzzing in the ears), ear pressure, dizziness (a general term that includes vertigo, light-headedness, sensation of almost fainting, etc.). nausea, visual blurring, tachycardia (rapid heart rate), irritability, problems with concentration and memory, and panic episodes associated with sensations of internal pulsation or quivering which arise when awake or asleep.

Does everybody living near wind turbines experience Wind Turbine Syndrome? By no means! What I discovered is that people with (a) motion sensitivity, (b) migraine disorder, (c) the elderly (50 years and older), (d) inner ear damage, and (e) autistic children and adults — all these are at statistically significant high risk.

The solution is simple: industrial wind turbines must be set back, well away from people’s homes, schools, places of work, and anywhere else people regularly congregate. In my 2009 report, I recommended a minimum setback of 2 km in level terrain. Studies done around the world since then have persuaded me that 2 km is not sufficient, especially in hilly or mountainous terrain — as with Cesme. In Cesme’s case, setbacks should be more on the order of 5 km or greater.

Hence my alarm when notified by Ms. Kura that Cesme is considering 500 m (or less) setbacks. This is wholly inadequate. I guarantee that, unless the setbacks are increased  substantially, there will be numerous victims of Wind Turbine Syndrome.

There’s more.  Dr. Salt referred to Dr. Steven Rauch, above.  Dr. Rauch, a physician, is the Medical Director of Harvard Medical School’s renowned Clinical Balance and Vestibular Center, part of the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary.  Dr. Rauch was recently interviewed by The New Republic:

Dr. Steven Rauch, an otologist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and a professor at Harvard Medical School, believes WTS [Wind Turbine Syndrome] is real. Patients who have come to him to discuss WTS suffer from a “very consistent” collection of symptoms, he says. Rauch compares WTS to migraines, adding that people who suffer from migraines are among the most susceptible to turbines. There’s no existing test for either condition but “Nobody questions whether or not migraine is real.”

“The patients deserve the benefit of the doubt,” Rauch says. “It’s clear from the documents that come out of the industry that they’re trying very hard to suppress the notion of WTS and they’ve done it in a way that [involves] a lot of blaming the victim” (“Big Wind Is Better Than Big Oil, But Just as Bad at P.R.,” by Alex Halperin in The New Republic, June 16, 2014).

Dr. Rauch made a similar statement to ABC News last fall.

I met with Dr. Rauch in Cambridge, Mass., several years ago.  He has read my “Wind Turbine Syndrome” book.  You’re welcome to contact him for his clinical opinion.  Notice, he actually treats WTS victims, and furthermore his specialty is neuro-otology — precisely the clinical specialty appropriate to WTS, since WTS is mainly a vestibular disorder.  (You might consider Dr. Rauch the “pope” of vestibular disease.)

Shifting gears, a group of mechanical engineers at the University of Minnesota recently mapped the airflow turbulence patterns of a 2.5 MW wind turbine.  Their technique was ingenious:  “A large searchlight with custom reflecting optics generated a two-dimensional light sheet next to the 130-m-tall wind turbine for illuminating the snow particles in a 36-m-wide by 36-m-high area.”  They literally mapped the vortices  being hurled off the turbine blades, using a  blizzard (!) as a kind of background screen.

Visit this website to see and savor the dramatic results.

Click open the video and notice the pulsed pressure waves from the blades — punching holes, as it were, in the swirling snow.  (You can also watch the video on YouTube.  That is, until the wind energy lobby manages to get it taken down.)

Think of volleys of acoustic artillery, much of it in the low frequency and infrasound range. Imagine the residents of Cesme being bombarded by this day and night.

You are looking at the huge, pulsed, sound pressure waves responsible for Wind Turbine Syndrome.  (The Minnesota group published their article:  Jiarong Hong et al., “Natural Snowfall Reveals Large-Scale Flow Structures in the Wake of a 2.5-MW Wind Turbine,” Nature Communications, vol. 5, no. 4216 (June 2014).

Ms. Kura tells me the turbines destined for Cesme are 3 MW.  Several years ago, the noted Danish noise engineer, Professor Henrik Moller at Aalborg University, published a paper titled “Low-Frequency Noise from Large Wind Turbines,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 129, no. 6 (June 2011), pp. 3727-3744.  Moller and his colleague, Christian Sejer Pedersen, demonstrated that “the larger the turbine, the greater the ILFN (infrasound and low frequency noise) produced.”  The following is the abstract of their paper.  (Professor Moller was summarily fired this spring.  Click here for the story, which has the wind industry’s fingerprints all over it.)

As wind turbines get larger, worries have emerged that the turbine noise would move down in frequency and that the low-frequency noise would cause annoyance for the neighbors. The noise emission from 48 wind turbines with nominal electric power up to 3.6 MW is analyzed and discussed.

The relative amount of low-frequency noise is higher for large turbines (2.3–3.6 MW) than for small turbines (2 MW), and the difference is statistically significant. The difference can also be expressed as a downward shift of the spectrum of approximately one-third of an octave.

A further shift of similar size is suggested for future turbines in the 10 MW range.

Due to the air absorption, the higher low-frequency content becomes even more pronounced when sound pressure levels in relevant neighbor distances are considered.

Even when A-weighted levels are considered, a substantial part of the noise is at low frequencies and, for several of the investigated large turbines, the one-third octave band with the highest level is at or below 250 Hz.

It is thus beyond any doubt that the low-frequency part of the spectrum plays an important role in the noise at the neighbors.

Given all of the above, you can see why I am concerned for the residents of Cesme.

A final word. The clinical literature, including publications by the World Health Organization on health effects from infrasound exposure, typically use the word that Dr. Kelley used in his reports to the US Department of Energy — “annoyance.” It’s really not an appropriate word. It vastly understates the sickness caused by infrasound exposure. (A mosquito bite is an annoyance. Wind turbine infrasound, on the other hand, triggers a debilitating cascade of illnesses whose features I enumerated, above.)

In medicine, we clinicians are morally bound to exercise what’s called the “precautionary principle.” That is, if we don’t know for certain that a procedure is harmless, we are obliged to exercise extreme caution in performing the procedure, in this instance building industrial wind turbines — which are well-known to produce impulsive (i.e., amplitude-modulated) infrasound — near people’s homes. This is, after all, common sense.

For decades, the wind industry flatly denied their turbines produced infrasound. It took monumental efforts by people like me to debunk this fallacy. Wind industry advocates likewise argued that only downwind turbines created noise, that is, low-frequency noise. Dr. Kelley and his research team effectively debunked that falsehood, in the articles referred to above. Finally, the wind industry clung to the fiction that, “If you can’t hear it, it can’t hurt you.” Professor Salt deflated that one.

It’s time to recognize that the global wind industry has hidden behind a series of (what turned out to be) falsehoods. Their untruths have been exposed and corrected in the published clinical and scientific literature, as shown above.

There is no excuse for building wind turbines in proximity to people’s homes.