{"id":28316,"date":"2014-02-18T11:46:29","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T16:46:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/static\/?p=28316"},"modified":"2014-02-18T12:06:45","modified_gmt":"2014-02-18T17:06:45","slug":"is-vestas-moral-compass-broken-um-did-it-ever-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/2014\/is-vestas-moral-compass-broken-um-did-it-ever-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Vestas\u2019 moral compass broken? (Um, did it ever exist?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"turbine<\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

The recent discovery of a\u00a02004 PowerPoint presentation<\/a>\u00a0by Vestas employee Erik Sloth to the former Australian Wind Energy Association (now the Clean Energy Council) demonstrating Vestas knew a decade ago that safer buffers are required to protect neighbours from noise, their pre-construction noise models are not accurate and that \u201cwe know that noise from wind turbines sometimes annoys people even if the noise is below noise limits\u201d is a disturbing contradiction to their rhetoric and the ideals of their campaign.\u00a0 It is also confirmation the global wind industry have in fact been peddling misinformation rather than facts.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Max Rheese<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

.<\/span>
\n\u201cWhat Vestas knew, and when\u201d<\/h2>\n

\u2014 Max Rheese, Executive Director, Australian Environment Foundation<\/a>. \u00a0Article published in\u00a0OnLine Opinion: \u00a0Australia\u2019s e-Journal of Social & Political Debate<\/a> (2\/17\/14)<\/p>\n

.<\/span>
\nThis is a story about the wind industry and turbine manufacturer, Vestas and the global campaign to counter dissent about the adverse impacts caused by their product to an often ignored minority of people living in rural communities\u00a0worldwide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is also about the useful idiots co-opted to help sell its message.\u00a0 A term used for those who are seen to unwittingly support an objectionable cause which they na\u00efvely believe to be a force for good.<\/p>\n

For a decade individuals and community groups have been calling for studies into the adverse health impacts of wind turbine noise both in Australia and overseas.<\/p>\n

This relatively recent phenomenon coincides remarkably with the growth in size of wind turbines from 50m in height to over 150m, taller than the Sydney Harbour Bridge.\u00a0 Noise from these massively larger turbines has increased correspondingly with low-frequency noise broadcast over a much larger area\u00a0according to Danish experts Professors Moeller and Pedersen<\/a>\u00a0who said \u201cIt must be anticipated that problems with low-frequency noise will increase with even larger turbines.\u201d<\/p>\n

The common refrain from wind energy companies and their supporters is that there is no evidence of\u00a0adverse health impacts<\/a>\u00a0to nearby residents.\u00a0 To be factually correct they should have been saying there was no\u00a0published\u00a0<\/em>evidence, which is why those affected want an independent properly constituted health study acceptable to all parties.\u00a0 Despite these claims by the wind industry as of late 2012 there were over a dozen peer-reviewed published papers linking wind turbine noise with health impacts.<\/p>\n

Supporters point to 20 reviews, mainly of existing literature, held in various countries that have found no\u00a0conclusive<\/em>\u00a0evidence linking turbine operations with poor health.<\/p>\n

Literature reviews of previous studies serve a purpose as do the plethora of separate studies by acousticians, sleep experts and physicians, many of which draw the conclusion there is a strong\u00a0prima facie\u00a0<\/em>case that low-frequency noise generated by wind turbines causes chronic sleep deprivation in some people which then degenerates to adverse health impacts.<\/p>\n

Global wind turbine supplier, the Danish company Vestas, launched their\u00a0Act on Facts<\/a>\u00a0campaign in Melbourne during 2013 to counter the \u201csuccess\u201d of community groups, the Waubra Foundation and the Australian Environment Foundation in convincing parliamentarians of the need for a study.<\/p>\n

The Act on Facts campaign, as the name implies, is to quash \u2018myths\u2019 and counter \u2018misinformation\u2019 by those who have concerns about the uncritical acceptance of wind energy.<\/p>\n

Therefore the recent discovery of a\u00a02004 PowerPoint presentation<\/a>\u00a0by Vestas employee Erik Sloth to the former Australian Wind Energy Association (now the Clean Energy Council) demonstrating Vestas knew a decade ago that safer buffers are required to protect neighbours from noise, their pre-construction noise models are not accurate and that \u201cwe know that noise from wind turbines sometimes annoys people even if the noise is below noise limits\u201d is a disturbing contradiction to their rhetoric and the ideals of their campaign.\u00a0 It is also confirmation the global wind industry have in fact been peddling misinformation rather than facts.<\/p>\n

Issues referred to in the Vestas presentation were commented on in the previously mentioned peer-reviewed paper by Professors Moeller and Pedersen published six years after the Vestas presentation, where they stated \u201cthat minimum distances to dwellings are often calculated from noise data that lack an appropriate safety margin.\u00a0 Using data without a safety margin, such as mean values for a given turbine model, measurements from a single turbine, or \u2018best guess\u2019 for future turbines gives in principle a probability of 50 per cent that the actual erected turbines will emit more noise than assumed and that noise limits will be exceeded.\u201d<\/p>\n

This statement no doubt accounts for some of the known instances of wind farms\u00a0exceeding noise guidelines<\/a>\u00a0as detailed in a Supreme Court case in South Australia.\u00a0 The level of angst in rural communities from disruption to their lives through intrusive noise and wind industry resistance to long-held community concerns has driven more than one expensive court proceedings.<\/p>\n

The numerous instances of wind farm operators refusing to release noise data, not keeping accurate records of complaints and buying out some neighbours to silence them with gag clauses is well known and also indicative of an industry desperate to suppress damning information.<\/p>\n

The Act on Facts campaign is acknowledgement by the wind industry that they have not been able to successfully control the dissemination of information that is detrimental to their very existence.\u00a0 Community support is vital for the wind industry as they cannot profitably survive in any country in which they operate without continued generous public subsidies.<\/p>\n

This is what makes the Vestas Act on Facts campaign nothing more than corporate spin as outlined in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>: \u2018Ken McAlpine, public affairs director for Vestas in Australia, said the highly-unconventional corporate campaign was being launched here because anti-wind groups in Australia had been more successful than in any other country. He accused some of spreading misinformation and using “astroturfing” (fake grassroots) campaigns to persuade politicians to pass legislation making wind farm operations more difficult.\u2019<\/p>\n

Or maybe the more than 2000 community groups in 33 countries have been successful because they are the only ones telling the truth.<\/p>\n

Does Vestas inside knowledge, since 2004, that their turbines will have an effect on some people and their subsequent denials of such constitute misinformation or something much worse?\u00a0 Certainly the culture at Vestas is called into question by Professor of Political Science, Peter Nedergaard from Copenhagen University who said \u201cThere\u2019s no doubt that Vestas here\u00a0smears its opponents<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

If one accepts at face value the claims of the wind industry, vociferously articulated over the last decade that there are no health impacts from wind turbine noise, it begs the question of why they are so secretive with regards to noise data.\u00a0 More importantly if they are so confident of their product, why not take the fight to their critics by vigorously encouraging government to undertake health studies to prove there are no adverse effects as they claim?<\/p>\n

Surely it would be in the interests of the wind industry to fund independent studies to vindicate their claims and silence critics, especially since they say their turbines pose no threat to human health.<\/p>\n

The hypocrisy of claiming moral purity while not taking available action that would exonerate them, while concealing information that damns their operations, exposes the duplicitous nature of the wind industry and some supporters.<\/p>\n

These supporters, many of whom are on the fringes of the medical fraternity, have either knowingly or unknowingly endorsed the denials of the wind industry.<\/p>\n

Despite the wind industry being well aware for years that their product has the potential to cause serious harm to human health they invited Professor Simon Chapman, the Climate and Health Alliance, and others to help Vestas launch their \u2018fact-based\u2019 campaign last year.<\/p>\n

Professor of Public Health, sociologist Simon Chapman<\/a> who lacks any medical or acoustic qualifications, has been vocal in the media denigrating those who call for medical research into the effects of wind turbines and spoke at the launch of the Act on Facts campaign.<\/p>\n

How can Professor Chapman reconcile his ridicule of the reasons numerous people have been forced to abandon their homes because of continuing adverse health effects with the knowledge that the company initiating the campaign knew a decade ago there were problems?<\/p>\n

Or how does Professor Chapman reconcile his statements at the senate inquiry into the impacts of wind farms where he was asked if he would be opposed to research into health impacts he said it \u201cwould be a wonderful idea\u201d with his strident advocacy depicting those seeking such research as \u201cscaremongering\u201d activists.<\/p>\n

Chapman in an SBS radio interview in January this year questions the need for any further research, despite thinking it is a wonderful idea, saying there have been a total of 20 reviews since 2003. Indeed there has; reviews of existing literature but no independent research.<\/p>\n

In the same interview he says \u201cthe U.S. research was done on wind turbines that were much smaller than what’s used today\u201d which renders that research completely irrelevant as per the conclusions of the Moeller Pedersen research.\u00a0 Chapman by his own statements displays no obvious comprehension of the acoustical properties of wind turbine operation, but pretends to understand the issue.<\/p>\n

What is worse though, for someone who parades his \u2018health\u2019 credentials while behaving like a dilettante on actual noise issues, Chapman and other \u2018health professionals\u2019 display an amazing lack of compassion in their dismissive attitude to people who claim to be suffering debilitating effects from pervasive wind turbine noise.\u00a0 Considering there has been no government health study demonstrating adverse health impacts \u2013 or studies showing there are not \u2013 one could be forgiven for thinking health professionals, of all people, would take a\u00a0precautionary approach<\/a>\u00a0as recommended by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).<\/p>\n

Indeed much the same could be said for the convenor of the Climate and Health Alliance (CAHA), Fiona Armstrong who also spoke at the campaign launch.\u00a0 What due diligence did the CAHA undertake before deciding there was no substance to the concerns of thousands of people around the world who are directly impacted by wind turbines?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As someone representing health professionals did Fiona Armstrong call for independent health studies to settle the noise issue once and for all?\u00a0 Having endorsed the Vestas campaign to stick to the facts, what is the response of the CAHA to the internal Vestas document acknowledging noise from their turbines impacts some people in rural communities?<\/p>\n

President of the CAHA is Dr Liz Hanna.\u00a0 It is assumed that Dr Hanna authorised the participation of CAHA at the Vestas launch of its corporate spin campaign. \u00a0This immediately puts both Dr Hanna and the CAHA in a position of assisting a turbine manufacturer to deny the adverse health impacts from its product – impacts which it is well aware of and were acknowledged in the 2004 presentation.<\/p>\n

There is no evidence any of these health professionals have taken the trouble to interview Annie Gardner<\/a>,\u00a0Donald Thomas, Trish Godfrey<\/a>, Noel Dean<\/a>, Brian Kermonde<\/a>, Melissa Ware<\/a>,\u00a0Carl or Samantha Stepnell<\/a> or dozens of others in Victoria alone to determine the integrity of their claims relating to the effects they have been subjected to from wind turbines.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the health professionals knew they would be confronted with inconvenient truths if they did, which would undermine their confected outrage at the temerity of those who do not genuflect before the turbines of righteousness.<\/p>\n

Another speaker at the campaign launch was Simon Holmes \u00e0 Court<\/a>, chairman of Hepburn Wind.\u00a0 Holmes \u00e0 Court is famous for being the driving force behind the two turbine community owned wind farm near Daylesford Victoria, the first of its kind in Australia.\u00a0 Holmes \u00e0 Court has assiduously cultivated the media in numerous feature articles to present as the community minded crusader for wind energy.\u00a0 He is perhaps infamous for Hepburn Wind repeatedly reneging on a commitment to release noise data from the Daylesford wind farm after a number of\u00a0nearby residents<\/a>, including a local doctor started suffering health impacts.<\/p>\n

Uncritical public acceptance of wind industry spin began to change after the 2011 senate inquiry into the impacts of wind farms, chaired by Greens senator Rachel Siewert made the unequivocal recommendation that \u201cthe Commonwealth Government initiate as a matter of priority thorough, adequately resourced epidemiological and laboratory studies of possible effects of wind farms on human health.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a decade of grass-roots rural community angst from being ridden over roughshod by multi-national energy companies aided by state and federal governments eager to be seen to be \u2018doing something\u2019 about climate change, while ignoring the basic human right to enjoy rest and repose in their own home, the issue of health impacts will now get the hearing it deserves.<\/p>\n

The Abbott government has announced a health study into the effects of wind farms with the Victorian government pledging $100,000 support.<\/p>\n

Environment groups that have supported the wind industry and taken their thirty pieces of silver, \u2018health professionals\u2019 who have no expertise in acoustics and no interest in faraway rural communities, but do have an overblown interest in climate health effects, have jumped on the wind energy bandwagon eager to claim the high moral ground despite the human collateral damage.\u00a0 They instead should have taken the time to look at the noise data and the evidence.\u00a0 It also would not have hurt to at least speak with the affected families as well.<\/p>\n

By allowing themselves to be co-opted as useful idiots to support a so-called \u2018noble cause\u2019, where the ends justify the means as well as failing to exhibit a modicum of caution or undertake due diligence, they now find themselves endorsing an industry denying in public what it knows in private to be true.\u00a0 Good luck with that!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a9 The National Forum and contributors 1999-2014. All rights reserved.<\/sub><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent discovery of a\u00a02004 PowerPoint presentation\u00a0by Vestas employee Erik Sloth to the former Australian Wind Energy Association (now the Clean Energy Council) demonstrating Vestas knew a decade ago that safer buffers are required to protect neighbours from noise, their pre-construction noise models are not accurate and that \u201cwe know that noise from wind turbines sometimes annoys people even if the noise is below noise limits\u201d is a disturbing contradiction to their rhetoric and the ideals of their campaign.\u00a0 It is also confirmation the global wind industry have in fact been peddling misinformation rather than facts. \u2014 Max Rheese . \u201cWhat Vestas knew, and when\u201d \u2014 Max Rheese, Executive Director, Australian Environment Foundation. \u00a0Article published in\u00a0OnLine Opinion: \u00a0Australia\u2019s e-Journal of Social & Political Debate (2\/17\/14) . This is a story about the wind industry and turbine manufacturer, Vestas and the global campaign to counter dissent about the adverse impacts caused by their product to an often ignored minority of people living in rural communities\u00a0worldwide. It is also about the useful idiots co-opted to help sell its message.\u00a0 A term used for those who are seen to unwittingly support an objectionable cause which they na\u00efvely believe to be a force for good. For a decade individuals and community groups have been calling for studies into the adverse health impacts of wind turbine noise both in Australia and overseas. This relatively recent phenomenon coincides remarkably with the growth in size of wind turbines from 50m in height to over 150m, taller than the Sydney Harbour Bridge.\u00a0 Noise from these massively larger turbines has increased correspondingly with low-frequency noise broadcast over a much larger area\u00a0according to Danish experts Professors Moeller and Pedersen\u00a0who said \u201cIt must be anticipated that problems with low-frequency noise will increase with even larger turbines.\u201d The common refrain from windRead More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[157,167,16,170,173],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.windturbinesyndrome.com\/static\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}