If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
EMILE ZOLA

Ten years too late, it’s good riddance to wind farms – one of the most dangerous delusions of our age

Christopher Booker UK

"I have been following this (wind turbine) extraordinary story for ten years ever since, in 2002, I first began looking carefully at what really lay behind this deceptive obsession with the charms of wind power. It didn’t take me long, talking to experts and reading up on the technical facts, to see that the fashionable enthusiasm for wind energy was based on a colossal illusion. I first warned about what I called ‘the greatest mistake in our history’ in an article in the Mail almost ten years ago.
I described the claim that it would be the answer to all our future energy problems as a catastrophic failure of judgment. I feared that windpower was stupendously inefficient and ludicrously expensive and that by falling for the greatest energy hoax of our time, the Labour government could be consigning Britain to a very dark future. So unreliable are wind turbines — thanks to the wind’s constant vagaries — that they are one of the most inefficient means of producing electricity ever devised."

"The erection of a wind turbine creates apprehension in the general public, which makes the property less desirable and thus diminishes the prices of neighbouring property...” “Continuing scientific uncertainty over the adverse health consequences of wind turbines only serves to perpetuate the debilitating effect of wind turbines on property prices.”
Ben Lansink, Appraiser

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Wind and Property

http://www.windawareireland.com/

Wind turbines negatively affect the value of property by varying amounts depending on the proximity of the individual house to the wind farm. Five different studies concur that this drop is between 11% and 40% for homes located within 2 km of a wind farm.

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The pre-eminent factor in the valuation of property is location. Many international studies have found that wind farms reduce the value of property substantially and this has been acknowledged by the British Government (Davis. 2008) who has reduced property related taxes on some homes because of reduced valuations caused by wind farm proximity.

A 2007 report on the impact of wind farms on house prices in the UK (Sims. 2007), authored by Dr Sally Sims and Peter Dent of Oxford Brookes University and funded by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Education Trust, found that terraced houses within 1.6 km of a wind farm dropped by 54%, with semi-detached houses dropping by 35%.

Michael McCann (2013) concurred with this finding. His study for a wind farm in Tipton County in Indiana included a literature review of 11 previous US studies. He concluded that properties within 2 kilometres of a wind farm experienced a drop of between 25% and 40%.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Library (LBNL) published a report in 2013, funded by the US Department of Energy, which claimed that the property-value effect of wind farms was likely to be small on average if it is present at all. Their report was extensive and examined over 50,000 home sales in proximity to 67 different wind facilities. However, only 2.3 % of the homes were within 1.6km of a wind farm with many up to 16 km away. The report’s own data found that homes located within one mile of the turbines decreased in value by 28 percent compared to homes located within 3 to 10 miles from the turbines. McCann explained that that many industry supported reports tended to play down the impact by “Pooling data from multiple diverse locations… which tends to set wide parameters that conceal actual impacts”. We have seen this misleading practice in Ireland also, where wind developers use entire counties as a basis for comparing property.

Perhaps the most comprehensive and independent study to date is that of the London School of Economics (LSE) (2013). This report, which will be launched in Spring 2014 and includes over a million property transactions, has found that larger wind farms of 20 or more turbines reduce property values by up to 12% within 2 km and by 3% at an 8 to 14 km distance. They also concluded that the amount required to compensate householders for their loss of visual amenity would be £12 million approx. for a typical 11 turbine wind farm based on the average number of households with turbines currently visible within 4 km. Importantly from an Irish perspective where many large wind farms are planned, they say; “The corresponding value for large wind farms will be much higher than this as their impact is larger and spreads out over much greater distances”. An important limitation of this study is that the average turbine in their extensive sample area was 90 metres high to tip. In Ireland, almost all planned turbines range from 130 meters to 185 meters.

References
Sims. 2007. Oxford Brooks University. What is the impact of wind farms on house prices? View.

McCann. 2013. Property value Impact and Zoning Compliance Evaluation. View.

Lawrence Berkeley National Library. 2013. View.

LSE. 2013. Gone with the wind: Valuing the local impacts of wind turbines through house prices. View.

Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors 2013. View.

Davis. 2008. Lincolnshire valuation tribunal 2525475645/032C. View

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