Maybe you preferred the view how it was before - but industrial wind-turbines at a distance of several miles will probably not stop you getting on with your life just as it was before the turbines popped up.
Some of us, on the contrary, think they look quite pretty going round over there - quite a nice addition to the scenery. And most of us get a bit of a warm, comforting feeling – at least something is being done to clean up our energy supply!
Closer up, the monster machines present a more menacing aspect. They are just so big, so out of scale with ordinary things round about them – trees, buildings, fences, livestock (not to mention people). I must admit, there’s a certain fascination, too. At least that’s what I find - as we all know, even quite horrible things can be fascinating...
One also becomes aware of the noise they make.
Out-and-out enthusiasts for wind-turbines sometimes deny that they make any noise at all, but anyone can disprove that for themselves by going up to a turbine when the wind is blowing. Perhaps the enthusiasts are referring to the fact that the turbines (if in good working order) are remarkably quiet mechanically. What you do hear is a ‘whoosh’ every time a blade of the turbine-rotor passes in your direction.
When the wind is light, the sound is interesting more than anything else. But as the wind gets up, the noise gets louder, and can be heard at greater distances (and not just downwind of the turbine). If your house is within a distance X of the turbine, there is a definite possibility that the noise from the turbine will be a nuisance to you. One of the problems is that the noise just goes on and on (till the wind changes): it is often described as like the noise of a train arriving in a station – but a train that never arrives; or in similar terms. Sometimes the noise is accompanied by waves of air-pressure, sufficient to cause the walls of a house to shake. In some cases the ‘whooshing’ develops into a rhythmic ‘thumping’. People find that their sleep is disturbed, and that they develop symptoms such as headaches and raised blood pressure.
All this is highly contentious, of course. The symptoms are dismissed as ‘psycho-somatic’ by the wind-turbine lobby (as if that made them any easier to bear – or can the developers show that the symptoms can be made to go away by means of appropriate psychotherapy?), the complainants as un-public-spirited whingers.
I think everyone agrees, however, that there must be some distance X from any large wind-turbine, within which it would be grossly unjust to expect anyone to live. The difficult part is to agree on a value of X for planning purposes. The developers have an obvious interest in keeping X as low as possible, but this leads to a stream of people whose quality of life is being spoilt and in some cases ruined by nearby turbines. As the rate of turbine installation goes up (in Aberdeenshire, for example) there is a danger that the number of new wind-turbine-victims will go up as well.
At present, in Aberdeenshire, there is an absolute recommended lower limit for X of 400 metres. But at distances greater than 400 metres it is recognized that the turbine-noise may be in excess of what is acceptable.
For planning purposes, an estimate has to be made of the noise that will be produced by a turbine or set of turbines at any given location. This lands us in another contentious area, for some of the phenomena that people complain of, such as shaking walls and ‘thumping’ are simply not recognized by the scientific models used to calculate noise-production by turbines. But it seems perfectly reasonable to expect that there will be something different about the pressure-waves produced by the 50-metre-wide rotor of a turbine, as compared with other sources of noise such as internal combustion engines or metal-bashing machinery. Let us not forget the huge amounts of energy being transferred from the air to the turbine blades – enough to power several hundred homes (at least momentarily), as we are told. The air will be stirred up in a very unusual, novel way.
There are now thousands of onshore turbines in the UK, from which to gather noise (and more generally, air-pressure-disturbance) data, and, I would guess, thousands of homes affected by noise from nearby turbines. Some thorough, broad-minded research needs to be done into the conditions under which human problems (including medical problems) occur. By ‘broad-minded’ I mean research that is prepared for the unexpected, for new phenomena – as opposed to the kind of research that says, there can’t be a problem because our calculations say there can’t be a problem.
Such research will be difficult, and expensive. In principle, the expense should not be a problem, thanks to the generous profits which onshore wind-turbine projects enjoy. (I am not for a moment suggesting that the developers should fund the research directly, but the cost could be levied from them.) Until the research is done, one can only support the call being made by many organizations, including the admirable Aberdeenshire-based CAWT, for a minimum separation distance from homes of 2000 metres to be imposed on industrial wind-turbine developments.
If you agree with this argument, it so happens that there is currently an opportunity for you to influence the planning system in this regard. Aberdeenshire Council is writing a new Local Development Plan. To find out how to view the relevant sections of the draft Plan, and to comment on them, click here. Comments have to be in by 5pm on Friday 1st October.
If you need convincing of the potential bad effects of nearby wind-turbines, a good place to start is the paper 'Wind Turbines, Noise and Health' by Dr Amanda Harry, a Plymouth GP. This research is not necessarily a model for the kind of research which I feel is needed, which will have to be extremely meticulous to satisfy both camps.
Another useful paper: 'Noise radiation from wind-turbines installed near homes: effects on health' by Frey, BJ and Hadden, PJ
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