A Wind Turbine Up Close

I was travelling across northern New York last week and went through the town of Chateaugay. A prominent feature just east of the village is the 103 megawatt wind farm spread across the countryside. The turbines are an industry standard size and type – General Electric 1.5 megawatt units, standing 80 meters (about 262 feet) tall at the hub, with a 77 meter blade diameter. The wind project is spread out enough that from one vantage point the most distant turbines have to be carefully picked out along the horizon.

My travelling companion and I stopped in the breakdown lane of Route 11 next to a recently mown hayfield with a turbine standing at the back end, about 750 feet away. We took a stroll up to the base of the turbine. I took some video clips with my admittedly low-resolution pocket camera. What struck us was that the turbine was inaudible at the road, and produced a gentle wuff-wuff-wuff noise when we were standing right under it. Ordinary conversation drowned it out. At a few hundred feet away the noise from the road completely overwhelmed it. It wasn’t an extremely windy day, but the turbines were producing. See the assembled clips below and make your own judgment.

I emailed a friend of mine in the industry and got the information on the turbines and the wind farm. I asked him if this was typical. He noted that the turbines do make more noise in higher winds, but that the ventilation fans in the nacelle are the real problem. They tend to come on during hot days with relatively low winds. He wrote that in his latest project they were installing extra sound attenuation on the nacelles to quiet the fans. The main point, in his opinion, was getting the spacing of the turbines and the distance from residences correct. I take this to mean that the right distance for one turbine is less than the right distance for the combined effect of two or three. His most telling comment was that the people who have the turbines on their land and get lease payments don’t seem to find the noise level a problem. It is the folks who didn’t get the payday who complain. I guess when that distant wuff-wuff is the sound of the cash register ringing it is music.

The dairy farmer accepts the smell of manure. So too, does the chicken farmer, who also tolerates the early morning rooster. Their neighbors, less so. To someone living next to a busy road, the noise of cars fades into the back of their consciousness. To someone like me, who lives in the boonies, the endless white noise of a city is oppressive. The endless fluting of a mourning dove is charming background music. I started my work career as a blacksmith, so the smell of coal smoke and the clang of the hammer fill me with joy. I like the look of wind turbines, but find concrete farm silos, those ones that show up in Vermont Life Magazine, appallingly ugly.

Wind projects require road building, excavation, concrete, and have all the impacts of any large construction job. They do produce noise and alter the appearance of the landscape. There are important, legitimate questions for a community to ask and standards that an installer must meet.

And yet, some of the opposition I hear has a flavor of emotional desperation to it, an intensity out of scale to the debate. I suppose it is ungenerous of me, but I wonder how much of the opposition to wind power is based on a gut reaction to change, or resentment at being left out of the payday. We have emotional reactions to the sights, sounds, and smells of our environment that depend on our experiences and beliefs. We tend to enjoy the familiar, and the novel sensation pleases us only when it associates with an existing positive category in our minds. The tricky thing with judging the merits of a commercial wind farm is to separate the legitimate concerns from our preconceptions and our emotional comfort zone. That principle applies to both the nearby homeowner and the engineer with the wind development company.