Entries in wind farm bats (31)
8/19/10 PSC commissioners discuss wind siting rules.
At an open meeting held Thursday at the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, commissioners discussed the the text of the proposed wind siting rule.
DOWNLOAD THE PROPOSED RULE BY CLICKING HERE
Commissioner Lauren Azar suggested a setback of 2200 feet from homes unless a developer can prove a turbine could be sited closer to a residence and still meet noise and shadow flicker standards.
She said the setback distance was based on information from PSC staff which indicated a 45dbA noise standard would be met at that distance.
However, Commissioner Azar also noted that the World Health Organization recommends 40 dbA as a nighttime noise standard, and indicated was the noise limit she preferred.
Residents under contract with developers could waive all standards and have turbines placed as close as 1.1 times the turbine height to their homes.
Chairman Callisto and Commissioner Meyer didn't offer their immediate opinions on Azar's suggestions.
Continued discussion of wind siting rules is scheduled for Monday.
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8/9/10 Sow the wind, reap bad legislation: What Maine and Wisconsin have in common
NOTE FROM THE BPWI RESEARCH NERD: For those of us who have been following the story of the wind industry in Wisconsin, the article below is chillingly familiar.
Wisconsin has also has a governor who pushed hard to change state law in order to 'fast track' wind projects. This meant stripping power from local government and forming a 'wind siting council' made up primarily of those with direct financial interest in the outcome of the rules they themselves created.
AUGUSTA — The Wind Energy Act of 2008, which gave developers fast-track approval for putting up wind turbines in some of the state's treasured high ground, was justified at the time in the name of jobs, energy independence and climate change.
“There is tremendous potential for Maine to become a leader in clean, renewable energy, including wind energy,” said Gov. John Baldacci, who appointed the task force whose report led to the bill. “This kind of investment would create jobs and help to expand Maine’s economy.”
But now, two years after the law was championed by Baldacci, some members of the task force are questioning whether the goals they set for wind power can, or even should be, achieved.
Critics and even some one-time supporters say the proponents of the law were swept up in a tidal wave of enthusiasm for a technology that turns out to require significant sacrifice from the state, but has little to offer Maine in return.
That issue was faced head-on recently when the state Land Use Regulation Commission was asked to rule on an extension of a TransCanada wind project in western Maine.
LURC Commissioner Ed Laverty summed up the problem with the bill: “Our job is to protect the resources in these high mountain areas ... given the fragile nature, and the rich nature of the resources in these areas, we have to ask ourselves, to what extent can these benefits really outweigh the long-term costs?
Chris O’Neil, a former state legislator who now works as a public affairs consultant to groups opposing wind power development in Maine’s mountains, said that the governor’s vision was fundamentally flawed.
“To fulfill the charge of making Maine a leader in wind power development and to simultaneously protect Maine’s quality of place is impossible,” O’Neil said.
The bill constituted one of the most significant changes in the state’s land use laws in a generation:
— It weakened longstanding rules that would have required wind turbines “to fit harmoniously into the landscape.” LURC Director Catherine Carroll said, “That’s a huge change.”
— The bill cut off a layer of appeal for those protesting state permits for wind power.
— It set ambitious goals for the development of wind power that could result in 1,000 to 2,000 turbines being constructed along hundreds of miles of Maine’s landscape, including the highly prized mountaintops where wind blows hard and consistently.
— It opened every acre of the state’s 400 municipalities to fast-track wind development.
Baldacci said all this could be done without hurting Maine’s landscape or the tourism industry.
The legislation was based on the report of the Governor’s Task Force on Wind Power Development, whose members all favored wind power development and who, likewise, asserted that their blueprint for wind power development would return substantial rewards and could be pursued without sacrifice.
“Maine can become a leader in wind power development, while protecting Maine’s quality of place and natural resources, and delivering meaningful benefits to our economy, environment, and Maine people,” task force members wrote.
Now, as wind turbines are sprouting on Maine’s mountains accompanied by heavy machinery, roads, transmission lines, substations, wells and concrete plants, that certainty is yielding to doubt for some.
“I think people didn’t have a good appreciation of this, including us, for what the whole thing entails,” said Maine Audubon’s Jody Jones, a biologist who served on the task force. “This process was another step to better environmental policy, but there were clearly flaws.”
And members of LURC have recently indicated they’ll turn down TransCanada’s wind power development in an ecologically sensitive, high-elevation region near the Canadian border. The move was widely seen as a rebuke to the idea that wind power should be developed at all costs and enraged the developer and wind power promoters.
That the unanimity behind the wind power law is breaking down does not surprise Jones.
Momentum slipping
“People live near them, projects have been built, we can touch and feel them in a way that’s not theoretical. ... There isn’t the momentum for wind power at all costs that there was when the task force did its work,” Jones said.
That momentum may have papered over some significant differences among task force members that are now becoming more obvious.
As they neared completion of their report on wind power development in December 2007, Baldacci made the unusual move of sending his senior policy adviser, Karin Tilberg, to press task force members to issue a unanimous set of recommendations.
They did as Baldacci asked, and that unanimity, from a group whose members represented prominent environmental groups as well as wind power developers, set the stage for the bill’s unanimous passage through a legislative committee.
Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion.
House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, said legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met. The number is likely to be at least 1,000 and perhaps as high as 2,000.
Instead, they got carried along in the wave of enthusiasm that emerged from the administration, the legislative committee, wind power developers and the governor’s task force.
“Wind power was exciting,” says Pingree. “I think legislators had a sense we wanted to be bold and have the state be a real leader in this area. They may not have known how many turbines, or the challenges of siting that many turbines.”
An investigation by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting of the workings of the wind power task force through numerous interviews and a review of relevant documents reveals a number of problems with the law and its development:
— Appointing only wind power supporters to the task force and rushing the legislation through the Legislature failed to address public skepticism about the state’s wind power policy. Issues that might have been aired through a State House debate continue to be raised by a growing number of critics of wind power, who doubt the policy’s premises that wind power brings widespread economic benefits, moves Maine off fossil fuels or can be developed without compromising the quality of Maine’s landscape.
— Members of LURC, who review proposals for wind power development in unorganized territories, have expressed consternation about the contradictory and perhaps unachievable goals of the Wind Power Act: to promote wind power development, ensure communities get benefits from the development and protect the very parts of the Maine landscape where wind power turbines are likely to be built.
— The designation of “expedited wind power zones” along some of the state’s wildest mountaintops has raised the value of that real estate, since it’s now a target for wind power development. That had the unintended effect of creating competition for conservationists who want to protect that land.
— The task force ignored the need for massive new transmission line construction to move wind energy from turbines to market, which could be costly to ratepayers, disrupt habitat and landscape and engender significant opposition from towns and conservation groups.
— At least one significant task force recommendation — to allow the DEP commissioner to modify permits if wind turbines made too much noise — was left out of the governor’s bill that became the wind power law.
— One of the most crucial discussions held by the task force — what lands to open to expedited wind power development — is not in the public record. There were no minutes taken or produced for those final two meetings of the task force.
Baldacci still a believer
Gov. Baldacci remains steadfast in his support of wind power. He and Tilberg refused to grant the Center an interview in person, but Baldacci responded to questions in writing:
“I believe that reducing reliance on fossil fuels for energy in Maine and the region will greatly increase Maine’s quality of place by reducing carbon emissions, slowing climate change from greenhouse gases (which affects our forests, watersheds, oceans and fisheries, agriculture, wildlife and other natural resources), pushing natural gas off the margins in the bid stack and thereby reducing electricity costs, promoting energy security and self-reliance, and keeping Maine citizens’ dollars circulating in Maine and not being sent to other jurisdictions.
“For many people, including myself, quality of place includes living in a manner that does not push environmental or safety risks to other places and people.”
Land-based wind power development is certainly not dead in Maine. But the wind power bandwagon that came roaring out of the State House in 2008 is encountering obstacles that are slowing it down.
“Call it the bloom off the rose, call it the emperor being exposed as having no clothes,” said O’Neil. “As the public learns the truth about the impacts and the benefits of this sort of development, the public is losing its interest in industrial scale wind.”
Combine those homegrown obstacles with an increasingly tight credit market and uncertainty over continued government subsidies for the industry, and wind power development these days in Maine looks like much less of a sure thing than Baldacci, the Legislature, some environmentalists and the wind industry hoped it would be just two years ago.
Naomi Schalit is executive director and senior reporter of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, a nonprofit and nonpartisan journalism organization based in Hallowell. E-mail: mainecenter@gmail.com. On the Web at pinetreewatchdog.org.
The BPRC Research Nerd
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8/7/10 Do bird and bat deaths matter to Big Wind?
NOTE FROM THE BPWI RESEARCH NERD: Why are more bats being killed in Wisconsin wind projects than anywhere else in the nation? Three recent post construction mortality studies show turbine related kill numbers in our state to be ten times the national average. They are even higher than those mentioned in the article below.
Bird, bat deaths prompt call for St. Lawrence Valley wind moratorium.
SOURCE North Country Public Radio, www.northcountrypublicradio.org
August 6 2010
Save the River, an environmental group based in Clayton, NY, wants a three-year delay in development of more wind power along the St. Lawrence River.
A spokesperson for the group says there are proposals for some 400 wind turbines in the Thousand Island region. Preliminary numbers from a study at an 86-turbine wind farm on Wolfe Island, a Canadian island near Kingston, Ontario, show higher than usual mortality among birds and bats. Martha Foley has more.
An environmental group is calling for a three-year moratorium on building more wind turbines in the St Lawrence Valley. Save The River points to recently released data indicating the 86-turbine wind farm on Wolfe Island caused more than a 1800 bird and bat deaths in six months.
The group’s assistant director Stephanie Weiss says that’s more than double the national average. “When we’re comparing these numbers, we’re talking about how many birds are dying in a 12-month period. The national average might be 2 or 3 or even as high as 4. But the numbers we’re seeing out of Wolfe Island are 8 birds per turbine, in a six-month period,” Weiss said.
Wolfe Island is Canadian territory. In Canada, the province decides where wind farms can be built. In New York State, it’s up to local town governments. Weiss says a moratorium would give them time to find out why avian mortality rates are so high on Wolfe Island. It’s the only wind farm on the St Lawrence River and it’s six months into a three-year study on bird and bat deaths caused by turbines.
“There are a lot of reasons why this could happen. Wolfe Island itself is an important bird area, designated by Nature Canada. It’s a part of the fly way, which is really important. We know there’s some really essential grassland habitat here. We know it’s incredibly important over-wintering raptor area,” said Weiss.
Weiss says once a wind farm is built, environmental damage is hard to undue. She says 400 wind turbines have been proposed in the Thousand Islands. And a thorough study at Wolfe Island will help local officials make the best decisions about if, and where, they should be built. “We can’t just guess at what kind of bird and bat mortality we would have. The three years are essential. I don’t think it’s too long. The wind will still be there,” Weiss said.
The BPRC Research Nerd
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7/30/10 Wind Turbine troubles North of the border AND Like a bad neighbor (especially in Rock County, Wisconsin) Acciona is there AND The moon is made of green cheese, economic recovery is made of green jobs
Dr. McMurtry on wind turbine concerns.
Click on the image above to hear why this Canadian doctor is concerned about the current state of wind turbine siting regulation.
NOTE FROM THE BPWI RESEARCH NERD:
Contracts signed by local landowners in Rock County were sold when Acciona bought the rights to develop an industrial scale wind project from fledgling wind developer, EcoEnergy.
EcoEnergy did not disclose how much profit they made from selling local contracts to the Spanish wind industry giant, but local landowners will not see a higher payout as a result, or an option to get out of the contract.
Five continguous Rock County townships have adopted ordinances that require wind developers to site turbines at least 2640 feet from non-participating homes.
In a matter of weeks, the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin will issue wind siting rules that will overturn those ordinances along with those of many other Wisconsin Towns and Counties.
Better Plan Wisconsin [BPWI], has repreatedly asked Acciona about its plans for the wind project in Rock County which at one time included siting 67 industrial scale wind turbines in the Town of Magnolia's 36 square miles.
Acciona has thus far failed to respond.
Landowners who signed contracts with EcoEnergy early on are now angered to find that the offer of a reported $4,000 per turbine per year is far below the going rate being offered to farmers in other communities in our state.
Some have expressed a desire to get out of those contracts and renegotiate something on par with what other wind developers are offering. Others want out because they have witnessed the damage and fragmentation of farm fields left behind by wind development in other parts of our state and want no part of it.
Still others have seen their families and communities torn apart by this issue and no longer feel that it is worth it.
However, landowners in Brown and Columbia Counties are finding out just how hard it is to get out of the contracts they signed at the kitchen table with the once 'friendly' wind developer.
Doing business on a handshake has long been the tradition in rural Wisconsin.
It was something that worked well before out-of-state wind developers began to show up at farmsteads with big promises and iron clad contracts.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, like a bad neighbor, Acciona is there too.
The Dean Report
(Posted July 28, 2010)
Within weeks of the towers first being turned on, Noel Dean began suffering adverse health effects. Australian newspapers quoted Dean this way: "I was waking up two days in a row with headaches, I'd have to take Panadol but they'd be gone by dinner time.
When the wind is blowing north I got a thumping headache, like someone belted me over the head with a plank of wood and I didn't know whether to go to the hospital or what to do. You couldn't really work."
Other symptoms he and his wife experienced included general malaise, nausea, sleeplessness and general uneasiness.
By July, the Deans had packed up and left their farm.
Around the same time, an investigation of wind farm noise complaints was underway in New Zealand. Residents living near the towers in New Zealand were filing complaints of sleep disturbance, annoyance, anxiety and nausea. As more people in both Australia and New Zealand became comfortable in talking about their health concerns a picture began to emerge that researchers found unusual. There were compelling similarities between experiences in two totally different countries, totally different environments and totally different turbines.
Audible wind farm sound and consequential sleep disturbance, annoyance and anxiety responses were similar for people in both countries. These effects were also experienced even under situations of near inaudible wind turbine sound.
The concerns of the Deans and others living within 3500 meters of operational wind farms triggered more than twelve months of intensive study by a group of 4 qualified researchers.
The result is The Dean Report, a detailed peer-reviewed analysis of the sound levels near the Dean's properties and the potential adverse effects of wind farm activity on human health.
Dr. Robert Thorne PhD[1], who authored the report, based his findings and conclusions on extensive field work, personal investigations, case studies and the development of sound analysis methodologies. He told Windaction.org that "the Dean Report, in its various forms, has been placed in evidence subject to cross-examination before a Board of Inquiry and formal wind farm hearings for the purposes of peer-review and critique. A hypothesis as to cause and effect for adverse health effects from wind farm activity is presented."
In news reports today, wind farm operator, Acciona Energy, insisted "there is already enough existing credible evidence proving there are no health effects from wind farm noise."
We respectfully disagree. The Dean Report makes clear we are only just beginning to understand problem.
[1] Dr. Thorne is a principal of Noise Measurement Services Pty Ltd in Australia. He holds a PhD in Health Science from Massey University, New Zealand. His professional background is the measurement of low background sound levels and the assessment of noise as it affects people.
Windaction.org wishes to express its thanks to Dr. Thorne and Mr. Dean for sharing the Dean Report with us and permitting us to provide its content to our readers.
SECOND FEATURE:
“It’s easier to make the case” about jobs, Viard said, “than it is to say ‘Is wind energy or offshore oil drilling what we should be doing?’”
“The jobs argument is very popular,” Viard added. “It is very annoying to economists.”
As the Senate rushes toward a vote on oil spill legislation, those seeking changes in the bill are loading their arguments with a potent political word: jobs.
The oil and natural gas industry warns that aggressive regulation of oil drilling could kill industry jobs and those beyond the petroleum sector. Renewable power advocates argue that omitting needed climate policies from the Senate bill threatens existing green jobs and fails to bolster those that could be created.
“People want jobs, and all the more so in a situation like this,” with an ongoing recession, said Alan Viard, an economist who is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “It naturally has a political resonance.”
But Viard and other economists warn that the jobs arguments is flawed. Industries tend to look only at a policy’s impact on one sector, ignoring the broader economic impact. And they avoid a tough examination of other factors that should dictate policy decisions, such as whether something is worthwhile and what are all the costs.
“It’s easier to make the case” about jobs, Viard said, “than it is to say ‘Is wind energy or offshore oil drilling what we should be doing?’”
“The jobs argument is very popular,” Viard added. “It is very annoying to economists.”
Jobs arguments long have been made to buttress and condemn many proposed policies and became more impassioned with the recession and high unemployment. The 2009 stimulus bill passed on promises it would create jobs. It included grants, loan guarantees and other incentives meant to drive job creation, particularly in the clean energy arena.
President Obama earlier this month promoted his policies as having helped workers. While the White House has not estimated how many clean-energy jobs its policies have spawned or protected, it said that overall the Recovery Act has saved or created 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs (Greenwire, July 15).
Democrats, renewable energy sectors and environmental groups promote the potential for “green job” creation as one of the reasons passage of climate legislation is crucial. Climate legislation now appears dead for this session, but as the oil spill bill moves forward, the jobs argument thrives.
Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, on Tuesday decried Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan to omit from the bill a renewable electricity standard, a national mandate requiring utilities to use some green power(Greenwire, July 27).
“We are going to see jobs lost,” Bode said. “We are going to see manufacturing facilities not built in the United States. For 85,000 people employed by the wind sector,” she said, “this is about survival as an industry.”
Clean Energy Works, an alliance of about 60 groups that want climate legislation, on Tuesday sent an e-mail to reporters with the subject line “CEOs: Obstruction of Climate Bill Sends Jobs to China, Dollars to Enemies, Increases Pollution at Home.”
The fossil fuel industry also is talking jobs, asserting that over-regulation of the sector could be devastating for workers.
“This would cut domestic production, kill American jobs, slow economic growth and cost billions in federal oil and natural gas revenues,” said Jack Gerard, American Petroleum Institute president and CEO, about a proposal to lift limits on petroleum company liability for oil spill damages (Greenwire, July 27).
“Majority Leader Reid suggests his bill will create 150,000 new jobs,” Gerard added, “but our analysis indicates that failing to develop in the deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico will cost more than that — 175,000 jobs, the majority of them in already hard-hit Gulf Coast communities.”
Any new jobs?
The reality, economists said, is that although a recession can temporarily shrink the number of jobs, there are roughly the same number of people working at any given time. Government policies can shift where those jobs exist, but for the most part not eliminate or create them, they said.
“Arguments about … the job-creating or job-destroying effects of climate legislation, those sort of miss the point,” said Chad Stone, chief economist at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “A transformation to a green economy would change the composition of jobs in the economy, not the aggregate number of jobs.”
Wind’s trade group argues that an renewable electricity standard would provide long-term stability for the industry and encourage private investment, leading to job growth. But that fails to acknowledge that policy could hurt jobs elsewhere, like in the coal industry, said Adele Morris, policy director for climate and energy economics at the Brookings Institution.
“The wind people, they want to focus on the gross jobs in their industry, not the net jobs across the economy,” Morris said. There may be other reasons to want wind versus coal jobs, she said, but that is a different argument.
The wind group disagreed.
“There are differences from one technology to another, and renewables tend to be more job-intensive energy sources,” AWEA said. “A critical portion of the jobs we are talking about here are manufacturing jobs, to make the 8,000 components that go into a modern wind turbine, and to create a U.S. supply chain here in the U.S. for wind and other renewable energy manufacturing.
“If those manufacturing jobs aren’t created here, they will go in Europe or China,” AWEA added. “Winning the clean energy manufacturing race is the critical opportunity right now with the RES.”
For environmental goals to succeed, Morris said, the power made from green sources has to be as inexpensive as possible. That means making the technology in the least expensive place possible. She did not say where that might be.
“Any policy that’s designed to drive manufacturing toward more expensive locations is ultimately going to undermine the environmental goal,” Morris said.
When government policies eliminate some jobs, over the long run the labor market adjusts, Morris said.
“The people who are employed in that industry eventually migrate to other sectors,” Morris said.
Larger effect
Over the short term, however, economists acknowledge adjustments can be painful to some workers and regions. The extent of that impact is open to some debate.
The American Petroleum Institute argues that an extended moratorium on deepwater oil drilling, or changes in tax law that make drilling less profitable, will eliminate jobs in the oil industry and well beyond it.
A report released Tuesday by the industry trade group says that more than 175,000 jobs would be affected annually by those kind of policies. It looked at the period from 2013 through 2035.
API reaches that number in its report by combining workers in three groups. It said that 30,183 oil company jobs would be at risk with a long-term moratorium. The analysis then adds in jobs indirectly connected to the industry, like workers with companies that make a product used in oil drilling or who work for a support company, like operators of contracted drilling rigs. That is another 63,207 positions, API said.
But the API report sees the affected employment pool as even bigger than those groups. The API study also includes all of the jobs that are affected by how oil company and ancillary business workers spend their wages. Those workers eat in a nearby restaurant, for example, and the report counts the job of the cook as also being relevant, said Kyle Isakower, API’s vice president of regulatory and economic policy. Those jobs, called the “induced effect,” total 82,051.
“Contrary to popular belief, the benefits of oil and gas development and production are not restricted to a narrow sector of the economy,” the API report says. “Rather, its impacts are broad-based benefiting manufacturing, construction, real estate, finance and insurance, health and social services among others.”
The same could be said of all jobs, some economists said. There is only so much money being spent in society at any one time, Viard said, and how it is spent has effects on different people.
“It’s absolutely true if I spend a dollar on offshore drilling instead of spending it on a hamburger, that is going to have a whole series of ripple effects,” Viard said. But the induced effect of not spending that dollar on the hamburger “is equally wide,” he said.
If an oil company did not spend money on drilling, Viard said, it might choose to return it to shareholders, who might spend it elsewhere or invest it, which could drive down interest rates and benefit home buyers.
“Everything affects everything,” Viard said. “There’s no way to trace where that money would go, but it would go somewhere, and wherever it went it would create jobs, direct, indirect and induced.”
Not all jobs have equal positive impacts on society, Isakower said.
“While there will be an induced effect for any job, some jobs have greater induced effects than others,” Isakower said. Oil industry jobs are among those that benefit many others, he said, because “they do tend to be higher-paying jobs than the national average.”
A moratorium could cause short-term pain to oil industry jobs and support businesses, Morris said, because those jobs tend to be concentrated in a few geographic areas.
“Workers can’t instantly change what industry their skills are suited to,” Morris said, and small businesses that service the oil drilling sector cannot quickly relocate.
“There’s no question that in the short run there can be economic disruption,” Morris said. “That doesn’t mean by itself [that a moratorium] is a bad policy. We could be buying time to prevent further economic degradation down the line.”
Economists argued that policy decisions should not be made solely or even largely on the basis of whether they will hurt or help jobs.
“Otherwise,” Viard said, “we would still have the horse-and-buggy industry because we didn’t want to lose horse-and-buggy jobs.”
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7/5/10 The headache Down Under: Like a bad neighbor, Acciona is there AND Wind siting council meeting on Tuesday
Noel Dean has a farm at Waubra but he and his family moved out 13 months ago when their headaches worsened.
“Sore ears, pain in and around the eyes, pain on top of the head, pain in the back of the head, behind the ears and early this year, we started to get throbbing pain at the back of the head and tinnitus,” he said.
“We couldn’t stay there another night – it was that bad.”
RESIDENTS REJECT WIND FARM HEALTH FINDINGS
SOURCE: ABC News, www.abc.net.au July 5 2010
By Kellie Lazzaro,
Campaigners against wind farms have rejected a report finding no scientific evidence to link wind turbines to health problems.
The National Health and Medical Research Council, which advises the Federal Government, found that there was no evidence that the turbines’ low frequency noise or shadow flicker made people sick.
But residents of Waubra in Victoria’s south-west who live near the state’s largest wind farm, say they are sick and are convinced that wind turbines are to blame.
Noel Dean has a farm at Waubra but he and his family moved out 13 months ago when their headaches worsened.
“Sore ears, pain in and around the eyes, pain on top of the head, pain in the back of the head, behind the ears and early this year, we started to get throbbing pain at the back of the head and tinnitus,” he said.
“We couldn’t stay there another night – it was that bad.”
Mr Dean first complained to the Waubra wind farm operator Acciona in May last year, but the company refused to give him access to the outcome of its investigation.
He then commissioned an independent report into noise levels at his property at a cost of more than $40,000.
He has just received that report by Noise Measurement Services and says it confirms there is a link between the low frequency noise from wind farms and adverse health effects.
“Anything from 1 to 20 hertz can cause adverse health effects and that is what we have found in a pulsing motion. It is a pulsing motion that makes the effects just a lot worse,” he said.
But in a rapid review of existing studies, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has found there is no published evidence of direct pathological effects from wind farms.
The director of the council’s evidence and advice branch, Professor John McCallum, says they have brought together opinion and evidence from all around the world.
“Shadow flicker is the flicking on and off of wind turbine shadows as the blades rotate. It is the glint off the surface of the blades and those are now minimised by treatment of the blades that prevents reflective glint as well, and they are the kind of four main areas that people talk about health effects from,” he said.
He says World Health Organisation (WHO) studies have found no reliable evidence that sound below the hearing threshold will produce physiological or psychological effects.
The NHMRC report refers to a study of three wind farms in the UK that found if people are worried about their health, they may become anxious and suffer stress-related illnesses.
For this reason Professor John McCallum says people who believe they are experiencing health problems should consult a GP, but he says the report commissioned by Noel Dean about noise levels on his farm would need to be further tested.
Donald Thomas also lives at Waubra and was a big supporter of the wind farm, until he too started getting headaches, heart palpitations and high blood pressure.
“We’ve invited the Health Minister and top health officials to actually come out to Waubra to talk to us and see what the problem is first hand, but none of them have bothered to do that. They just look at overseas studies and pick the ones that suit them,” he said.
The National Health and Medical Research Council acknowledges the health effects of renewable energy generation have not been assessed to the same extent as those from traditional sources and recommends authorities continue to monitor research.
The National Environment Protection and Heritage Council has met in Darwin today to consider national wind farm development guidelines.
NOTE FROM THE BPWI RESEARCH NERD: Acciona has several projects in the works in Wisconsin, but we've had no luck getting them to tell us what their plans are for our communities.
WIND SITING HEARING NOTICE
Tuesday July 6, 2010, beginning at 1:00 p.m and 6:00 p.m.
Docket 1-AC-231
Public Service Commission of Wisconsin
First Floor, Amnicon Falls Room
610 North Whitney Way, Madison, WisconsinAudio and video of the meeting will be broadcast from the PSC Website beginning at 1:00.
CLICK HERE to visit the PSC website, click on the button on the left that says "Live Broadcast". Sometimes the meetings don't begin right on time. The broadcasts begin when the meetings do so keep checking back if you don't hear anything at the appointed start time.
MEETING NOTICE
Wind Siting Council
Docket 1-AC-231Agenda
1) Welcome/Review of today’s agenda
2) Review and adoption of meeting minutes of June 21, 2010 & June 23, 2010
3) Straw proposal amendment ballot results
4) Straw proposal revisions based on ballot results
5) Additional revisions to straw proposal prior to end of public comment period
6) Next steps/Discussion of next meeting’s time, place and agenda
7) Adjourn
NOTE FROM THE BPWI RESEARCH NERD:
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD A COPY OF THE WIND SITING COUNCIL STRAW PROPOSAL
The BPRC Research Nerd
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