Wind Turbine Opposition Syndrome

One of the arrows in the quiver of those who oppose the siting of wind farms in their area is an affliction called “Wind Turbine Syndrome.” It has an assortment of symptoms such as headaches, disturbed sleep, blurred vision, dizziness, and digestive troubles. The theory is that there are health effects caused by the sound of wind turbines, especially low frequencies, plus vibrations transmitted through the ground. The primary proponent of this syndrome, at least in terms of actual research, is Dr. Nina Pierpont, M.D., PhD, a pediatrician living in Malone, NY. She performed a case study on a group of families living near a wind farm in upstate New York.

As you can imagine, wind power advocates didn’t let this stand. The American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations assembled a panel of scientists and had them study the problem. The panel looked at European studies of the effects of wind farms and reviewed the science on the relationship between acoustics and human health. They released a report in December of 2009.

I recently read the report from executive summary to appendices. The report is thorough and coherent. The panel’s reasoning makes sense to me in terms of fundamental physics and biology.

I’ll get right to the meat of their conclusions and then dig a bit deeper.

“In the area of wind turbine health effects, no case-control or cohort studies have been conducted as of this date. Accordingly, allegations of adverse health effects from wind turbines are as yet unproven. Panel members agree that the number and uncontrolled nature of existing case reports of adverse health effects alleged to be associated with wind turbines are insufficient to advocate for funding further studies.

In conclusion:
1. Sound from wind turbines does not pose a risk of hearing loss or any other adverse health effect in humans.
2. Subaudible, low frequency sound and infrasound from wind turbines do not present a risk to human health.
3. Some people may be annoyed at the presence of sound from wind turbines. Annoyance is not a pathological entity.
4. A major cause of concern about wind turbine sound is its fluctuating nature. Some may find this sound annoying, a reaction that depends primarily on personal characteristics as opposed to the intensity of the sound level.”

In addition, from the executive summary:

* "The sounds emitted by wind turbines are not unique. There is no reason to believe, based on the levels and frequencies of the sounds, that they could plausibly have direct adverse physiological effects."
    * If sound levels from wind turbines were harmful, it would be impossible to live in a city given the sound levels normally present in urban environments.

There are some telling results from previous European studies, as follows:

“A strong correlation was also noted between noise annoyance and negative opinion of the impact of wind turbines on the landscape, a finding in earlier studies as well.”

“Approximately 10 percent of over 1000 people surveyed via a questionnaire reported being very annoyed at sound levels of 40 dB and greater. Attitude toward the visual impact of the wind turbines had the same effect on annoyance.”

“Annoyance was correlated with sound level and also with negative attitude toward the visual impact of the wind turbines.”

The researchers also note that Dr. Pierpont misinterprets a study on the effect of subsonic vibrations on the human body, much to the advantage of her thesis. It has to do with the threshold level at which humans sense vibrations through bone as compared to air. You can read the details in the report itself at the link above.

The panel’s rejection of Dr. Pierpont’s study rests partly on its contradiction of well-established science on acoustics and biology. It also has to do with the fact that Dr. Pierpont performed her case series study on self-selected individuals. Dr. Pierpont advertised for people living near a wind farm who thought they were experiencing symptoms due to noise. She interviewed 38 people from 10 families, but didn’t compare their experience to anyone else near the wind farm. That is what the panel meant by the reference to the absence of case-control or cohort studies in the excerpt above. A case –control study would compare a group of individuals near wind farms to another group of demographically similar people who do not live near wind farms. A cohort study is similar in that it reviews the histories of people who are alike in most ways but differ in one significant aspect. Asking people with grievances to come forward isn’t conclusive science.

The panel also explored the so-called nocebo effect. We are all familiar with the placebo effect, where people experience real relief due to their expectations about a fake drug. The nocebo effect is the mirror of this, when people experience symptoms of illness due to their expectation that a particular event or treatment should cause such symptoms. This is common in drug trials, where test subjects experience nausea, dizziness, headaches, or even rashes after downing an empty capsule. The panel concludes that the symptoms of the families in question are either irrelevant to their proximity to wind turbines or the product of negative expectations.

The report categorically rebuts the concept of wind turbine syndrome, and does it without breaking a sweat, scientifically speaking. In 2006 the UK Department of Trade and Industry published a study that came to the same conclusions. The UK National health Service also critiqued Pierpont’s study as weak in design and proving nothing. Also in 2006, Canadian Acoustics magazine published an article by Geoff Leventhall, a noise and vibration consultant, that explored the fallacies of wind turbine infrasound.

Setting aside the idea of acoustically induced symptoms, annoyance is a real issue. Designers need to take this into account when planning and developing wind installations. It is important, however, to deal with this issue as what it truly is – an emotionally driven value judgment – and not a health effect. That places it in the arena of debatable community-wide values. If annoyance became an unstoppable basis for law, we’d all spend our lives in court.

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.
 

Wind and Community

Perhaps you have read (those of you who live in Vermont) about the wind power project proposed for Ira, West Rutland, and surrounding towns. A company called Community Wind, headed by a man named Per White-Hansen, wants to develop a wind farm approaching 80 megawatts in capacity on the ridgelines in the area. It has generated intense controversy. Here is a clip from one of the public meetings attended by Mr. White Hansen and his public relations man Jeff Wennberg, former Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. A local resident asks about a device he found on his land:



I know some folks from that area who have attended a number of these meetings. The developers have done just about everything wrong. One could catalog their process into a book: "How to Alienate Local Communities and Botch a Wind Development Project." They started with secret lease agreements with gag orders attached. Then, as noted in the video clip, they (or their consultants) trespassed on people's land and put up monitoring devices without the landowner's permission. They changed their story depending on their audience. And so on.

I relayed this info to a friend of mine who is involved with Renewable Energy Vermont, our state's renewable energy organization. He said that he had already gotten a dozen calls about it from within the organization. The consensus was "These idiots are making us all look bad." Of course, hiring Jeff Wennberg, Governor Douglas’s slap in the face to the Vermont environmental community, was not a brilliant strategic move either. Mr. White-Hansen recently announced that he was scaling back his plans, eliminating turbines around Suzie’s Peak in Tinmouth. He explained it as an enlightened response to public opinion, but the word on the dirt roads is that he couldn’t get key landowners to sign necessary leases.

So these particular developers are making a bollocks of the job. What about the subject in general?

Non-renewable energy is non-renewable, so we are going to be running on renewable at some point. That is a definite end state. Fewer, larger energy systems are more cost effective than many small ones, in general. If we want relatively low cost energy we are going to have to install fewer, larger generators, which will have concentrated impact on particular communities. In the case of wind, these will be communities with specific topography such as the high ridgelines in Ira, Middletown Springs, Tinmouth, and Danby.

It raises questions of local vs. state balance. We could say "Fine, citizens of Ira (or any other town with a good wind site), you want a few small wind turbines for yourselves, so you and the rest of Vermont will endure dramatically higher electricity prices in the future." We could, with appropriate attention to local concerns and reasonable mitigation of effects, ask them to host a megawatt-scale wind farm. The locals would experience a mix of benefits and problems.

We experience this question of balance and localized impact with our power system as it is today. Some people live near large, ugly, dirty conventional power plants. Some people live near large, ugly transmission lines and substations. Not everybody who lives near a power plant or transmission line benefits from it in what they would consider a fair proportion to what they sacrifice. Many of us live nowhere near a power plant or high voltage transmission line but enjoy the benefits thereof.

People sometimes ask me, "Why not just solar? Why do we have to have these huge wind turbines?" I ask them if they are willing to pay five times as much for electricity in the winter, when sun-hours are scarce and wind is plentiful. That's the decision we have to make. We are used to an unending and cheap supply of electricity from far off power plants brought in over huge power lines. We can’t assume that this will be the pattern in the future. In fact, we can safely assume that the paradigm will be exactly the opposite – smaller, decentralized power systems with distributed generation sources, making electricity for sub-regional markets.

That said, we do have to put in place some kind of rational guidelines for wind development so that developers like those presented above don't bulldoze in and screw people around. Conversely, so that one occasional summer resident can't throw a wrench in the works and deny us renewable electricity.

I don’t buy the aesthetics argument against wind power. What is beautiful in a landscape is entirely subjective and changes with time. I happen to dislike the appearance of farm silos. Nevertheless, they appear repeatedly in picturesque photos of Vermont in our premiere tourism magazine, Vermont Life. Why are multi-story unadorned concrete cylinders capped with galvanized steel domes considered picturesque? I like the dark blue Harvestore silos a bit better, but they were considered an aesthetic abomination when they were first introduced. Now they show up in those Vermont Life photos as well. I also dislike the appearance of gas stations, fast food outlets, big box stores, and pseudo-colonial McMansions, but each has its advocates touting economic utility, property rights, and consumer choice. We put up with a huge number of blights on our landscape that don’t actually need to be ugly or imposing simply because some real estate developers or corporate-backed franchisees had their way with us.

The key difference is that a fast food franchise does not technically have to be ugly but a wind turbine has to be tall. The farther the turbine blades get from the ground the faster and smoother the airflow they encounter. Faster and smoother wind means more power and longer turbine life, which means cheaper power. The power available in wind increases by the cube of the wind speed. Double the speed means eight times the power. Even the small increment of speed and smoothness offered by another ten feet of tower makes a noticeable difference. That also means that a wind turbine has to be located where there is decent wind. In Vermont that is a ridgeline between 1600 and 2400 feet high. At greater altitudes than 2400 feet the turbine blades tend to ice up in the winter. Tall and high up means visible, and there’s the rub.

Another constraint is transmission. Put some tens of megawatts of generation somewhere and you need sufficiently large power lines to get that electricity to market. There happens to be a high voltage line going west from Rutland along the Route 4 corridor, right at the northern end of the Ira/West Rutland ridgelines. Not every ridgeline in Vermont has a high voltage line running nearby, so that cuts down the possible locations dramatically.

There is an intellectual dishonesty to saying reflexively “Yes, wind power is important, just don’t put it here.” Not every location where wind is technically and economically possible is also environmentally and socially appropriate. Each citizen has the right and duty to question a developer and hold a wind development company to appropriate standards. But if everyone says, “Not here,” then are we all willing to accept the consequences?

Coal, natural gas, and uranium are getting scarcer by the hour. Someday we will have far less power available to us at a far greater price. In order to have a stable utility grid we will have to base our generation portfolio on the most stable renewable source, hydroelectric power. Wind, solar, wave power (on the coasts), and to a lesser extent, biomass, will make up the rest. In a best case scenario I can see us generating about a quarter of the electrical energy we now enjoy. We will need every kind of renewable energy source available to us. We can’t wait for the economics of scarcity to drive renewable energy development unless we want to endure a desperate interregnum, an electrical Dark Age, while we scramble to develop renewable generation.

That means that we need to start making hard decisions about the location of wind generation right now. The residents of towns with ridgelines and nearby transmission capacity need to realize that their little patch of Vermont was chosen by geologic and human history as one of a handful of viable sites for something we all need. I don’t expect or desire the residents of these towns to roll over and say “Do what you want.” I do expect them to formulate a positive, proactive vision of how they would like to see wind developed. I expect them to pressure the state government to create realistic and workable guidelines for wind development. Otherwise the eventual answer to the question “Got any electricity?” will be “Not here.”