While the province of Ontario appears to be onto something promising with its new Green Energy Act (see recent AEInews post), local wind skeptics point out that in recent years, the province has taken wind developers’ environmental assessments at face value.  Citizens can request that the province conduct a full-scale independent assessment, and indeed, such requests have been put forward 31 times since 2006.  In every instance to date, however, the request has been denied (nine are currently outstanding).  Provincial authorities assure that the required private assessments include taking into account citizen concerns, and often involve mitigation, as part of “a lot of back and forth” between the companies and provincial regulators.  Regarding noise issues (AEI’s primary concern), it would seem prudent to do some “ground-truthing” of industry sound propagation models: if there are instances in which neighbors are being affected by unexpectedly high noise levels, then future assessments should be sure to not use the same models that failed earlier.  This is but one example of the value that even a few independent assessments could offer as the province moves forward with its ambitious plans to abandon coal-generated power.

A great short piece in Canada’s esteemed Maclean’s magazine from early August highlights the aggressive push being made by provincial minister of energy to open up the province for wind power.  George Smitherman, the self-styled “Mr. Wind,” may be on to something, because his initiatives are stirring up both anti-wind activists concerned about noise and health effects AND the industry itself, aghast at new setback requirements for large wind farms.

A combination of requiring utilities to enter into long-term, premium price contracts with wind farms and a massive upgrade to the distribution grid has spurred plans for 103 new “shovel-ready” windfarms in the Province, especially along its extensive Great Lakes shorelines.  This has locals worried, after hearing tales of woe from wind farm neighbors elsewhere.  Dr. Robert McMurtry, a former dean of medicine at the University of Western Ontario, says that  “When I first read about the side effects I thought that they didn’t sound very convincing. But then I did my homework, and I became alarmed.”  Based on surveys he has done, and others in Europe, McMurtry estimates that 25 per cent of people living within 2.5 km of turbines experience disruptions in their daily lives, especially sleep disturbances, which often balloon into other health problems. He thinks that there are enough problems, in wind farms worldwide, to justify a serious epidemiological look at the industry. “You can assume that all these people are liars,” says McMurtry. “But many of these folks will tell you that they welcome wind turbines. They just want someone to turn them off at night, or move them further back.”

New provincial set-back standards issued in June may well be just what this doctor ordered. While not going all the way to 2.5km (about 1.5mi), the new standards call for increasingly large setbacks for larger windfarms, peaking at 1.5km (just under a mile) for wind farms of over 26 turbines; smaller wind farms can be 550m away, loud small ones 950m away.  The Canadian Wind Energy Association claims that these new rules will require changes in 96 of the projects, with 48% of their turbines out of compliance; 79 of the projects are now either “non-viable” or require “back to the drawing board” redesign.

Smitherman is not phased by either side’s reactions.  “I totally understand that there aren’t many people out there looking for more electricity infrastructure in their backyards,” he says. And if somebody has to go back to the drawing board and redesign some projects, “I apologize that it will be inconvenient in some circumstances. But bigger setbacks are part of the Green Act.” But he’s unapologetic about the larger goal, one that would be truly revolutionary: to eliminate coal-fired electricity by 2014—only five years away.

As AEI has tracked noise complaints around wind farms on land, which seem fairly common between a half mile and mile (and in some cases up to a mile and half or so), I’ve held on to the idea that offshore will be the better way to go.  Offshore wind developers have been mostly aiming for siting turbines far enough offshore to minimize visual impacts (2 or more miles), which I had assumed would also make them inaudible from shore.  But recent reports are throwing some doubts on that hopeful thought.  We need to hear more from other locations, but a wind farm that began operating on Wolfe Island, Ontario, this summer has surprised local observers with its long-range sound transmission.

Wolfe Island Wind Farm

Wolfe Island is at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway.  Even ship operators have noticed turbine noise at 2-3 miles distant (and ships are not exactly a quiet place to listen from), and locals across the channel in Cape Vincent, NY have also been hearing the wind farm readily at 2-3 miles, and, in some atmospheric conditions, as far away as 7 miles!  Yikes….   The reasons for the easy long-range sound transmission are not yet known, though sound does travel well across water, so that may be a key feature.  If so, it ups the ante on offshore wind farms, at least when prevailing winds are toward shore.  (Though we must note that this is not along the coast, but rather at the end of a huge lake which fosters strong prevailing winds.) This one is not yet a clear red flag, but it bears watching….

And, on a brighter note, the health of Wolfe Island residents is being charted by Queen’s University researchers, in the first research study to assess health before and after wind farm operations begin in a community.  This is an important next step in clarifying whether the health effects that have previously been reported are widespread, or rare.

With one of the nation’s “poster child” noisy wind farms in Mars Hill and a popular former governor advocating (and financing) more use of wind power, the State of Maine continues to be at the forefront of the debate over how much credence to give to neighbors’ reports and concerns about wind turbines close to their homes.  Seventeen neighbors of the Mars Hill wind farm, who live from under 2000 feet out to 3600 feet from active turbines, have filed suit against the wind farm developer, asking for compensation for loss of property values, nuisance and emotional distress, and upgrades to the turbines to make them quieter (download the full complaint).

The Todd Residence in Mars Hill. Photo by Anne Ravana.

The state gave the Mars Hill farm a variance to the state noise ordinance, allowing it to be 5dB louder than normally permitted; recordings made by a state-funded acoustics firm indicated that not all locations were fully in compliance, yet the state signed off on the results as being good enough.  The state also hired an acoustics consultant to peer-review the monitoring study, and in his report, this consultant expressed several concerns with the results, saying that “wind turbine noise needs more investigation!” Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has initiated a formal investigation of wind turbine setback requirements, after numerous complaints about noise.  Minnesota Public Radio has a long piece on the process (both audio and a transcript), and a local regulatory advocate points us to the right documents on the PUC website for more information.

A recently-released report by Dr. Christopher Hanning, a UK MD whose specialty is sleep disorders, takes a comprehensive look at factors affecting sleep disturbance caused by nearby wind farms, and is highly recommended reading for anyone working to develop regulations at the local or state level.  Hanning’s primary point is that external noise need not WAKE a sleeper to cause problems, and the repeated “arousals” can break the most restful periods of sleep.  He notes that “The sleep, because it is broken, is unrefreshing, resulting in sleepiness, fatigue, headaches and poor memory and concentration.”  These are precisely the symptoms often reported by people living near wind farms. He stresses that arousals are also associated with “physiological changes, an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, which are thought to be responsible for the increase in cardiovascular risk. Arousals occur naturally during sleep and increase with age (Boselli 1998) which may make the elderly more vulnerable to wind turbine noise. Arousals may be caused by sound events as low as 32 dBA and awakenings with events of 42dBA (Muzet and Miedema 2005), well within the measured noise levels of current wind farms” and the levels permitted by most jurisdictions.

The report also summarizes other studies suggesting that night-time noise levels are often higher than sound models predict, as well as one that suggests that wind farms cause high levels of annoyance at lower sound levels than other common noise sources.  He concludes that “While it may be possible to produce a reasonable acoustically based theoretical approach to calculating set back distances (Kamperman and James 2008b), it makes more sense to rely on recommendations from observations of the effects on real people at established wind farms.”

Download the full report here.

Thanks to Lynda Barry at National Wind Watch for the heads up.

Nice find of the day: A page on the Yosemite website describing the work they did over the past two summers to assess the soundscapes in the park.

http://www.nps.gov/yose/naturescience/soundscape.htm

And that’s not all!  There’s also a link to a half-hour MP3 file/podcast featuring the NPS Natural Sounds Program’s lead scientist, Kurt Fristrup, talking about his studies of the effect of noise on predator-prey relationships (a line of research that I tell people about more often than nearly any other), as well as noise effects on animal communications and human physiology. The audio feature also addresses the acoustic health of Yosemite as well as some interesting discoveries made possible through recordings made in the wilderness.  See the webpage here, and listen to the MP3 story here.

After my participation on a Canadian government expert group looking at offshore oil and gas noise, I headed west to Banff for my second appearance as a plenary speaker at the Alberta oil and gas industry’s biannual Spring Noise Conference. Here, participants are largely agency staff and noise control contractors, with a few oil and gas companies participating as well. Alberta has a vibrant oil and gas industry (read: most important economic driver for the Province), and while the landscape is heavily tapped by traditional oil and natural gas drilling, coalbed methane development, surface coal mining, and, infamously, oil sands development, Alberta’s noise regulations are among the most stringent in the world: impact on neighbors cannot exceed 5dB above the local ambient noise conditions.  This year’s conference (and the very informative pre-conference workshop I attended) expanded from its roots in oil and gas development, to include wind farms.

Read the rest of this entry »

Debate continues to swirl around wind farm development across the US, as local communities struggle to find the right balance between green energy and minimizing impacts on wind farm neighbors.  At the crux of the issue is how close to homes turbines should be built.  The wind energy continues to push for setbacks as small as 1000 feet, while local residents report significant noise impacts up to a half mile or mile.  In Wisconsin, where five wind farm proposals have been derailed since 2007 by local setback ordinances of 1800 feet to a mile, which the industry deemed too severe, a push is on in the state legislature to transfer all decision-making power to state authorities, stripping localities of regulatory authority.  In Maine, two physicians have urged the state to take note of clear health effects caused by audible noise from the Mars Hill windfarm: Read the rest of this entry »

An AEI book review of:
One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest for Natural Silence in a Noisy World
Gordon Hempton and John Grossman
Free Press, 2009

After a quarter century of listening to and recording the sounds of the world around him, along the way becoming one of the most respected natural sound producers on the planet, Gordon Hempton has written a book-length reflection on the perilous state of our natural soundscapes.  The story is shaped around a cross-country journey during which Hempton visits a variety of American landscapes, visits allies old and new in his quest to raise awareness about the insidious expansion of human noise, and finally arranges a series of meetings with “movers and shakers” in Washington, DC, to press his cause of creating the nation’s first noise-free zone in Olympic National Park.

Hempton is, of course, a sensitive listener.  The book is best read, it seems to me, as three related but distinct threads, interwoven throughout the telling.  The first is the raison d’etre for the project: to make a case for actively protecting natural quiet (rather than simply reducing noise); here Hempton draws on the voices of a dozen or so other careful listeners, Read the rest of this entry »

A new noise-cancelling system being developed in Germany could help to minimize what has become a major source of concern for residents near wind farms. While some noise-dampening systems are already used in turbines, they are “passive”, meaning that they reduce certain frequencies or sources of vibration noise, but do not respond “actively” to the changing frequency ranges of an operating turbine.

The new system “listens” for vibrations and then produces vibrations that exactly match, in reverse, the problematic motion within a turbine tower or base. From PhysOrg:

“These systems react autonomously to any change in frequency and damp the noise – regardless of how fast the wind generator is turning,” says André Illgen of the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU in Dresden. The key components of this system are piezo actuators. These devices convert electric current into mechanical motion and generate “negative vibrations”, or a kind of anti-noise that precisely counteracts the vibrations of the wind turbine and cancels them out. The piezo actuators are mounted on the gearbox bearings that connect the gearbox to the pylon. But how do these piezo actuators adjust themselves to the respective noise frequencies? “We have integrated sensors into the system. They constantly measure the vibrations arising in the gearbox, and pass on the results to the actuator control system,” says Illgen. The researchers have already developed a working model of the active vibration dampers, and their next step will be to perform field trials.

The Klondike Wind Rush is underway, and while wind energy is a crucial wedge in the emerging renewable energy mix, some nearby neighbors of wind farms are reporting noise levels that are higher and more disruptive than they’d been led to expect.  Simple noise models suggest noise should be inaudible beyond a quarter mile or so, but residents between a half mile and mile are quite often finding the noise intolerable.  What is going on?  This question is just the sort of thing we love here at AEI: a chance to dig in and get a big-picture view that moves beyond the strident and self-assured voices of advocacy groups on both sides of an issue.  The result, published online in March 2008, was the AEI Special Report: Wind Turbine Noise Impacts.

This report is now available as a downloadable, printable document.  Running to 30 pages in the pdf format, the report provides a comprehensive overview of issues being addressed by local planning commissions as wind energy companies seek new sites for this piece of our energy future.  We’ve also put together an 8-page pdf version that is useful as a quick overview for the public and local officials.  

See http://www.AcousticEcology.org/srwind.html for the full online report (continually updated), along with links to download the 30-page and 8-page pdfs.

Read the rest of this entry »

The spread of wind turbines into quiet rural areas is leading to increasing complaints that they make more noise than residents were led to believe. While simple annoyance and sleep disturbance are the most common effects, in some cases, nearby residents are reporting health problems that they associate with the presence of the turbines, leading some to move from their homes. Not long after wind turbines began to spin in March near Gerry Meyer’s home in Wisconsin, his son Robert, 13, and wife, Cheryl, complained of headaches. Cheryl also sometimes feels a fluttering in her chest, while Gerry is sometimes nauseated and hears crackling. The nearest turbine is 1,560 feet from Meyer’s house. His dismay over an energy source he once thought was benign has made the retired mailman, 59, an activist. He travels the state warning communities considering wind farms to be wary. “I don’t think anyone should have to put up with this,” says Meyer, who compares the sound to a helicopter or a jet taking off. Read the rest of this entry »

Been wondering what’s up with the great “Sonar Kills Whales”/”Everything’s Fine, Just Go Away” rhetorical battle between NRDC and the Navy? As you might suspect, the reality is not nearly so neatly defined as either of them might suggest….and if you’re up for digging into it more deeply, the Acoustic Ecology Institute has just posted an AEI FactCheck that explores three key questions:

• Dead Whales: How Common?
• Behavioral Reactions: Millions of Whales Affected, or Negligible Impact
• Additional Mitigation: Common Sense Precautions or Undermining Sailor Safety?

There’s a fair dose of decoding science and regulatory details in this document, as well as acknowledgment of the underlying unspoken ethical questions that lead to radically different perspectives on the same data.

Check it out at
http://www.AcousticEcology.org/srSonarFactCheck.html
AEI is a resource/information center for sound-related environmental issues, run by editor/writer Jim Cummings (yup, that’s me…). We’ve some how managed to become friends with top scientists and agency staff, major environmental groups, and even a few folks in the Navy and oil and gas industry. More at http://AEInews.org

Plans for a modest-sized wind farm in rural Wales have been abandoned after one of the developers decided that it would have to be cut in half to meet local noise standards. While energy company E.On had hoped to build a 10 megawatt, 8-turbine wind farm, their analysis showed that only a 5 megawatt project would avoid causing a “noise nuisance” to nearby homes, and they could not justify investing in the smaller project. E.On’s head of new business Danny Shaw said: “We certainly didn’t take this decision lightly but, as a responsible developer, we simply wouldn’t be willing to build a scheme that we thought had the potential to exceed acceptable noise limits.” E.On’s planned partner, Arts Factory, hopes to proceed with the smaller project. Arts Factory chief executive Elwyn James said, “We’re disappointed obviously, although we would be just as cautious as E.On about the possibility of causing noise disturbance.” Source: BBC News. 7/2/08 [READ ARTICLE]

 Todd and Jill Stull of Portage, Pennsylvania have sued the operators of the Allegheny Ridge Wind Farm, alleging that the turbines near their homes create noise in excess of local regulatory limits. Attorney Bradley Tupi, representing the Stulls, alleges in the lawsuit that Gamesa Energy misrepresented to local officials the noise levels from the turbines to get approvals for construction of the wind farm. “They assured the officials in the township in question that the turbines would be quiet. Read the rest of this entry »

Calumet County, in eastern Wisonsin, recently faced a dilemma that is increasingly common in rural America: an outside company had appeared in their region, planning to build wind farms and seeking permits. Many local governmental bodies have taken a cursory look at complex reports submitted by companies, taken assurances of “no noise” at face value, and later regretted not learning more. The Calumet County Board of Supervisors took two years to consider the issue, and in March instituted a carefully considered ordinance to govern wind farm development that is exceedingly (perhaps even excessively) weighted toward protection of local residents from noise impacts. Read the rest of this entry »

While reports of nearby industrial wind farms causing annoyance with their noise are becoming fairly common, a physician who has been looking at the most severe complaints has coined a phrase: “wind turbine syndrome.” Nina Pierpont, a New York pediatrician who has taught at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, has found a consistent cluster of symptoms associated with people living near wind turbines, including sleep problems, headaches that increase in severity, dizziness, nausea, exhaustion, anger and irritability. “A setback of 1.5 miles from homes, schools, hospitals and similar institutes will probably be adequate Read the rest of this entry »

The latest AEI Special Report takes a close look (or, listen) to the growing concerns about noise impacts from wind farms.  While it appears that only about 20% of wind farms trigger noise complaints, it is crucial that wind energy developers take a close look at these, to assure they don’t repeat the same mistakes.

As usual with AEI Special Reports, the Wind Energy Noise Impacts report is designed to offer a comprehensive yet concise “ten-minute version” of the issue, with links to more in-depth source material.  It includes sections on wind turbine noise, current regulation, comments from neighbors disturbed by noise, possible factors in noise complaints (atmospheric effects top the list), emerging technology, and links to industry trade groups, government agencies, and advocacy groups, both pro and con.

To read or print the report, visit http://www.AcousticEcology.org/srwind.html 

Some excerpts are below the fold:

Read the rest of this entry »

New San Diego Commuter Train Quieter Than Many Expected – The new Sprinter commuter train has begun test runs along lines that closely abut many residential areas in North County, CA, near San Diego. First impressions seem positive, with many residents noting the much quieter horns being used as the train approaches the many road crossings: the car-like horn sounds at just 85dB, as compared to standard freight and commuter train horns at 107dB. Tom Kelleher, a spokesman for the transit district, said he always expected the public to find the Sprinter much easier to live with than other passenger trains that traverse North County. “I think people really thought  Read the rest of this entry »