Category — Environmental problems windpower

“The people who build wind farms are not environmentalists. . . . Business is a delicate balancing act, and chief executives are always walking a tightrope between the needs of the community, their employees, and the marketplace.”

- Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 454.

The front page exposé in the New York Times of another problem of industrial wind—coming on top of Robert Bryce’s eye-opening Wall Street Journal piece on air emissions relating to firming wind energy—presents another problem for Big Wind and Big Environmentalism.

Windpower’s noise problem is nothing new–it has just been swept under the rug by the industrial wind complex. The oft photoshoped pictures of wind turbines skip the sound–that would ruin the idyllic facade of the energy source that is radically uneconomic and an inferior energy source compared to conventional electricity generation.

Small wind has a noise problem too. Big wind? Suffice it to say you don’t want to live or work near an industrial wind park, or even a solitary wind turbine, unless you have to.

Property values will work to internalize the externality over time, which is bad for existing owners and good for new owners. And some existing land owners will receive land royalties to put up with their discomfort. But what about victimized neighbors? And in a free society, wind turbines would not exist for the noise problem to be an issue. (Funny how government intervention has unintended consequences.) Electricity would be generated in much greater quantities indoors in power plants.

Tom Zeller’s “For Those Near, the Miserable Hum of Clean Energy” (New York Times, October 5, 2010, p. 1)  brings wind’s noise problem to the attention of the environmental Left, in particular. Wind has not solved this problem, one that Paul Gipe spent 20 pages (pp. 371–91) discussing in his 1995 book, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons).

Gipe confronts the noise issue squarely (p. 371):

“Next to aesthetic impact, no aspect of wind energy creates more alarm or more debate than noise…. Wind turbines are not silent. They are audible. All wind turbines create unwanted sound, that is, noise. Some do so to a greater degree than others. And the sounds they produce—the swish of blades through the air, the whir of gears inside the transmission, and the hum of the generator—are typically foreign to rural settings where wind turbines are the most often used.”

“The people who choose to live in [rural, wild] locations do so primarily because the land is unsuitable for other urban uses,” Gipe explains in his book (described as “the most complete reference ever published on generating electricity from wind”). “They reasonably expect that the area will remain rural and undeveloped” (p. 324).

Zeller’s NYT piece is reprinted in its entirety due to its historical importance. [Read more →]