If you're prone to motion sickness, don't click on the image below.
THE NEXT WIND SITING COUNCIL MEETING IS SCHEDULED FOR 9AM TUESDAY MAY 4 2010 IN FOND DU LAC COUNTY
Council members and public will visit the home of WSC member Larry Wunsch in Invenergy's Forward Energy wind project.
Following this, Council Member Andrew Hesselbach from WE Energies will host a tour of the Blue Sky Green Field project which he helped to bring about as project manager.
NOTICE OF COUNCIL TOURS Wind Siting Council Docket 1-AC-231
9:AM Tour of Wunsch Property W6976 County Road F Brownsville, WI 53006
Itinerary 1) Meet at and tour Wunsch Property 2) Meet at and tour Blue Sky Green Field Wind Project
Note from the BPWI Research Nerd: This will be an open meeting and subject to open meeting rules. The public is allowed to attend, observe, and record the proceedings but cannot participate or speak to council members while the meeting is in session. The Nerd hopes to see you there.
LAST Wednesday was International Noise Awareness Day, but if you missed it, you weren’t alone. Begun in New York 15 years ago as a grass-roots effort to educate people about the harmful health effects of excessive noise, Noise Awareness Day rapidly gained attention and advocates around the world. Gradually, though, America’s enthusiasm for the day began to abate. This year, in New York City, a mobile unit offered free hearing tests behind City Hall — that was about it for one of the noisiest cities on earth.
The scale of our noise problem isn’t in doubt. In recent years rigorous studies on the health consequences of noise have indicated that noise elevates heart rate, blood pressure, vasoconstriction and stress hormone levels, and increases risk for heart attacks. These reports prove that even when we’ve become mentally habituated to noise, the damage it does to our physiologies continues unchecked.
Studies done on sleeping subjects show that signs of stress surge in response to noise like air traffic even when people don’t wake. Moderate noise from white-noise machines, air-conditioners and background television, for example, can still undermine children’s language acquisition. Warnings about playing Walkmans and iPods too loudly have been around for years, but some experts now believe that even at reasonable volumes a direct sound-feed into the ears for hours on end may degrade our hearing.
Yet by focusing on the issue exclusively from a negative perspective, in a world awash with things to worry about, we may just be adding to the public’s sense of self-compassion fatigue. Rather than rant about noise, we need to create a passionate case for silence.
Evidence for the benefits of silence continues to mount. Studies have demonstrated that silent meditation improves practitioners’ ability to concentrate. Teachers able to introduce silence into classrooms report that it fosters learning and reflection among overstimulated students. Professionals involved with conflict resolution have found that by incorporating times of silence into negotiations they’ve been able to foster empathy that inspires a peaceable end to disputes. The old idea of quiet zones around hospitals has found new validation in studies linking silence and healing. These are macro benefits, but often silence feels good on a purely animal level.
If you have the means, you buy your luxury silence in the form of spa time, or products like quiet vacuums, which are always more expensive than their roaring bargain cousins. The affluent pay for boutique silence because, like silk on the flesh and wine on the palate, silence can kindle a sensory delight.
Unfortunately, in a world of diminishing natural retreats and amplifying electronic escapes, this delight is in ever shorter supply. The days when Thoreau could write of silence as “a universal refuge” and “inviolable asylum” are gone. With all our gadgetry punching up the volume at home, in entertainment zones and even places of worship, young people today often lack any haven for quiet.
These problems are everywhere, but can be especially acute in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Too many people think of silence only in terms of “being silenced,” of suppressing truth. In consequence, silence itself is now often suppressed.
People who appreciate the values of silence have, by and large, done a poor job of sharing their understanding — let alone of actually making silence more democratically accessible. Yet silence can be nourished in our larger spaces not just by way of an inward journey most people lack the tools to embark upon, but through education and architecture.
Some of the imaginative work being done today by urban planners involved with soundscaping demonstrates that it’s easier to create oases of quiet — by, for example, creating common areas on the rear sides of buildings with plantings that absorb sound — than it is to lower the volume of a larger area by even a few decibels. And having access to these oases can greatly enhance quality of life.
A recent Swedish study found that even people who live in loud neighborhoods report a 50 percent drop in their general noise annoyance levels if residential buildings have a quiet side. These modest sanctuaries can provide at least a taste of silence, which is then recognized not to be silence at all, but the sounds of the larger world we inhabit: birdsong and footsteps, water, voices and wind.
Perhaps rather than observing a muted Noise Awareness Day, next year we should declare the whole of April to be International Silence Awareness Month: an opportunity to think about how to bring a positive experience of silence to the growing numbers of people who live in a relentless wave of sound. Even a little bit of silence can create a sense of connection with our environment that diminishes alienation, and prompts a desire to discover more quiet.
George Prochnik is the author, most recently, of “In Pursuit of Silence.”
NOTE FROM THE BPWI RESEARCH NERD: The World Health Organizations says nighttime noise levels should be kept to 35 decibels and below to insure healthy sleep. The PSC has approved noise levels of 50 decibels for wind projects in our state.
THIRD FEATURE: WHAT'S ON THE DOCKET?
Want to keep up with what's going on with the wind siting council? For some it's like watching paint dry, for others it's watching people toss your future around in their hands
This from Brown County Resident, Joanne Vercauteren
Everyday someone is writing and telling you that the setbacks have to be farther away from the nonparticipants property line, well I`m going to say it again.
To do the right thing for everyone involved in these projects you most have some consideration for the nonparticipants. We pay for the property and we pay the taxes on it, so we should have a little bit to say how close we want something to our property line.
I know the host have their rights also as our town board keeps reminding, but they have no rights putting the turbines so close to our homes and property. If they need the money that bad that they have to go behind closed doors and sign contracts without talking to their neighbors to see how they feel, then let them put these things as close to their homes and families as necessary to get them at least ½ mile if not farther from our homes,families and property lines.
That would be the fair thing to do. ½ mile is not a lot to ask, seeming other countries are putting them 1 mile away from nonparticipants property lines, because of health and safety reasons.
Between now and September the people in the town of Glenmore are going to know what it feels like to live among the turbines. Some people that are going to have these things real close to their new homes are starting to speak up, but it`s too late, because their town chairman told them at meetings that these were government regulated, but actually they are not.
The town`s people could have stopped the project it they would have been told the tru[th]. I feel sorry for them, but we tried to explain it at one of their meetings and the board said there is no more discussion on turbines, because there is nothing we can do, the government wants these.
So I guess either their town board was lied to or they just didn`t care enough to really check into it out. Money always rules!
This is how things are happening now, so that is why you have the job to make it right for all people involved with the turbine projects.
I do not thin[k] these wind turbine are a good fit for our communities that are highly populated, you sure wouldn`t think about putting them right downtown among the homes and business there, so why are our communities any different.
We have homes, schools,churches and business too! The companies that are pushing these turbines most likely disagree with a 1/2 mile setback, but then again they are just in it for the money, they do not care about anyone else`s feeling.
Maybe if they would listen to people who have to live with these things everyday they would understand, but instead they just turn their backs on them and try to pay them to be quiet.
Why don`t you take a week like a few of us suggested and live in the turbine farm and also talk to some of the people who have wrote about their lives living with the turbines in their backyards, then maybe you could understand where we are coming from asking for the setback to be no less them ½ mile from our property lines.
These setbacks will hopefully keep our families , friends and neighbors safe from any health effects that these wind turbines may cause. I'm hoping you take our letters in to consideration when you make you final draft.
Respectfully submitted
Joanne Vercauteren
Town of Morrison
May 2, 2019
FEATURE NUMBER FOUR: From the Better Plan Vaults:
What's the connection between noise and coronary heart disease? What do wind turbines have to do with any of this?
According to the results of a new peer-reviewed study made available to us by the U.S. government's National Institutes of Health, the connection between noise and coronary heart disease -particularly at night- is serious.
Our wind energy ordinances must include a top limit for how much turbine noise can safely be added to our environment. The wind industry and the Wisconsin Draft Model Ordinance tell us 50 decibles is safe. This article by M. Nathaniel Mead helps us understand why this is not enough protection.
NOISE POLLUTION: THE SOUND BEHIND HEART EFFECTS
More than 15 million Americans currently have some form of coronary heart disease (CHD), which involves a narrowing of the small blood vessels that supply blood and oxygen to the heart. Risk factors for CHD include diabetes, high blood pressure, altered blood lipids, obesity, smoking, menopause, and inactivity. To this list we can now add noise, thanks to a recent study and assessment of the evidence by the WHO Noise Environmental Burden on Disease working group. The findings, first presented at the Internoise 2007 conference in August 2007, will be published in December.
“The new data indicate that noise pollution is causing more deaths from heart disease than was previously thought,” says working group member Deepak Prasher, a professor of audiology at University College in London—perhaps hundreds of thousands around the world. “Until now, the burden of disease related to the general population’s exposure to environmental noise has rarely been estimated in nonoccupational settings at the international level.”
The separate noise-related working group first convened in 2003 and began sifting through data from studies in European countries to derive preliminary estimates of the impact of noise on the entire population of Europe. They then sought to separate the noise-related health effects from those of traffic-related air pollution and other confounding factors such as physical inactivity and smoking. In 2007, the group published Quantifying Burden of Disease from Environmental Noise, their preliminary findings on the health-related effects of noise for Europeans. Their conclusion: about 2% of Europeans suffer severely disturbed sleep, and 15% suffer severe annoyance due to environmental noise, defined as community noise emitted from sources such as road traffic, trains, and aircraft.
According to the new figures, long-term exposure to traffic noise may account for approximately 3% of CHD deaths (or about 210,000 deaths) in Europe each year. To obtain the new estimates, the working group compared households with abnormally high noise exposure with those with quieter homes. They also reviewed epidemiologic data on heart disease and hypertension, and then integrated these data into maps showing European cities with different levels of environmental noise.
The noise threshold for cardiovascular problems was determined to be a chronic nighttime exposure of at least 50 A-weighted decibels, the noise level of light traffic. Daytime noise exposures also correlated with health problems, but the risk tended to increase during the nighttime hours. “Many people become habituated to noise over time,” says Prasher. “The biological effects are imperceptible, so that even as you become accustomed to the noise, adverse physiological changes are nevertheless taking place, with potentially serious consequences to human health.”
To further assess the noise-related disease burden, the working group estimated disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) due to noise-related CHD. DALYs reflect how much the expectancy of healthy life is reduced by premature death or by disability caused by disease. This measure lets policy makers compare disease burdens associated with different environmental factors and forecast the likely impact of preventive policies. The working group estimated that in 2002 Europeans lost 880,000 DALYs to CHD related to road traffic noise.
Chronic high levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline can lead to hypertension, stroke, heart failure, and immune problems. According to a review of the research in the January–March 2004 issue of Noise and Health, arousal associated with nighttime noise exposure increased blood and saliva concentrations of these hormones even during sleep. “Taken together, recent epidemiologic data show us that noise is a major stressor that can influence health through the endocrine, immune, and cardiovascular systems,” says Prasher.
Other recent support for an association of cardiovascular mortality with noise comes from a study published in the 1 January 2007 issue of Science of the Total Environment. The results showed an 80% increased risk of cardiovascular mortality for women who judged themselves to be sensitive to noise. “Given these findings, noise sensitivity is a serious candidate to be a novel risk factor for cardiovascular mortality in women,” says Marja Heinonen-Guzejev, a research scientist at the University of Helsinki and lead author of the paper.
There is also a potential interaction between noise and air pollution, given that individuals exposed to traffic noise, for example, are often simultaneously exposed to air pollution. Prasher is currently investigating the effects of noise alone and in combination with chemical pollution.
The broader implications of chronic noise exposure also need to be considered. “Noise pollution contributes not only to cardiovascular disease, but also to hearing loss, sleep disruption, social handicaps, diminished productivity, impaired teaching and learning, absenteeism, increased drug use, and accidents,” says physician Louis Hagler, who coauthored a review on noise pollution in the March 2007 Southern Medical Journal. “The public health repercussions of increasing noise pollution for future generations could be immense.”
Written by M. Nathaniel Mead Environ Health Perspect. 2007 November; 115(11): A536–A537.
Copyright This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose.
Noise Pollution: The Sound Behind Heart Effects
M. Nathaniel Mead
1/17/08 WIND FARM NOISE IS A BIG PROBLEM FOR RESIDENTS, BUT WIND FARM OWNERS STILL AREN'T SURE THERE IS A PROBLEM AT ALL
January 17, 2008 The Tribune-Democrat
The Portage Township supervisors are jumping into the fray over what some residents say is excessive noise from turbines at the Allegheny Ridge Wind Farm.
Supervisors will hire a private sound engineer to determine the amount of noise made by the spinning turbines.
The move comes at the urging of residents who say the windmills sometimes operate at sound levels exceeding ordinance limits.
Two months ago, officials in Juniata Township, Blair County, ordered an independent sound study.
"We're agreeing to work with them on this," Supervisor Elwood Selapack said of a plan to hire Paul Heishman, a sound engineer from Mechanicsburg, to conduct noise studies.
A dollar limit on the study was not set by Portage Township officials, but the cost is not expected to exceed a few thousand dollars, based on a proposed fee for the Juniata work.
Built by Gamesa Energy USA and sold last year to Babcock & Brown, the wind farm is at the Cambria-Blair county line, and the turbines affect residents in both counties.
Heishman is expected to do the studies after Feb. 1, when steps being taken by Gamesa to eliminate the noise problems are completed, officials said Wednesday.
Local residents Bruce Brunett of Portage Township and Jill Stull of Juniata Township are convinced the noise - which they compare to the roar of a jet - is not the rotors, but a design flaw.
The townships have ordinances setting allowable noise limits from the turbines at 45 decibels, a level Heishman said is similar to bird calls on a summer day.
Juniata Supervisor Dave Kane said he heard the noise from the turbines and is concerned.
"They definitely have a problem. The windmills were making noise last week. They sounded like jet motors," Kane said.
Babcock & Brown spokesman Matt Dallas said the company is hopeful that work to repair the turbine rotors will quiet the machines.
The company still is not convinced noise levels exceed maximum allowable levels.
Recent testing by a sound engineer showed the levels within the ordinance levels, Dallas said, adding the testing was done "under every condition."
Of particular concern for Portage Township officials is the yet-to-be-completed second phase of the project, where many of the turbines overlook Martindale, a town of 150 homes about a half-mile from the site.
"The topography and configuration of the Martindale area is exactly what it is in Juniata Township. They're down in the valley, and they're going to get the noise," Brunett said.
Meanwhile, Babcock & Brown said it wants to be a good neighbor.
"We're willing to do what it takes to make sure we are within those (ordinance) guidelines," Dallas said.
Home in Invenergy wind project near the Town of Bryron, Fond du Lac County, WI
In February, Brown County Citizens for Responsible Wind Energy hosted an informational meeting at VanAbles in Hollandtown, WI. The event drew over 600 people. One of the speakers was Monroe County farmer, Doug Fries, who spoke about why he changed his mind about hosting Invenergy's wind turbines on his property.
Here is some of what he said about his encounter with Invenergy wind developers:
"They offered us four thousand dollars a year.... I was the middle guy in Ridgeville. I own 900 acres. And they said to me right before the one meeting, "We know we're offering everyone four thousand, but for you what we'll do is this: how much money will it take?"
I said, "I thought you said everybody gets the same."
"Well, you're the guy right in the middle. We can't make this work without you."
So I said, "I get more, then?"
"Yeah. How much more will it take?"
I said, "You guys need to get on the road. Because we're done talking. Because you're liars."
They lied to us. They went right down to the meeting an hour later and told everybody at that meeting that everybody got the same.
My son, myself, and my hired man was sitting at the table when they said that. They denied saying it at the meeting, just an hour earlier what they said.
I don't want to deal with guys like that. I want to deal with guys that are on the up and up.
Watch all of what Doug Fries had to say by clicking on the links below: Part One
Baker Tilly Capital successfully provided advisory services to wind developers to sell a 20-megawatt wind farm facility.
CH Shirley Wind, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Central Hudson Enterprises Corporation (CHEC), plans to invest $50 million in a 20-megawatt wind farm located in Glenmore, Wisconsin.
CH Shirley Wind acquired a 90-percent controlling interest in the project, which carries a 20-year power purchase agreement contract with Wisconsin Public Service Corporation for the electric output of its eight wind turbines. Construction on Shirley Wind will begin in 2010 and is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2010.
"Baker Tilly Capital was able to deliver the required funding partner, support negotiations of our development agreements, and effectively meet project timelines while in a tremendously challenging capital market."
- Bill Rakocy, Managing Member Emerging Energies of Wisconsin, LLC
Click on the image below to watch a video interview with Barbara Ashbee, one of the wind project residents in Ontario forced out of her home by wind turbine noise.
To: All Liberal and NDP MPP's in Ontario. Minister Gerretsen, Minister Duguid, Premier McGuinty and Minister Matthews
On Wednesday April 28, 2010 by your words and actions, you very forcefully told me via the media and formally at Queens Park in the Legislature, that my husband and I are not credible.
You told many Ontario families that they are not credible.
You told Dr. Robert McMurtry and Carmen Krogh that they are not credible even with their exceptional credentials and unparalleled professional experience.
Not one of you has ever called me or interviewed me.
Your incompetence, your neglect and your apathy forced my husband and I from our home. You are fully to blame and I resent that you continue to do this to additional families in Ontario with all of the information you have at hand.
Instead of correcting the problems your choice is to continue to publicly and callously demoralize and cause harm to people.
While you were spouting your negligent commentaries about the extensive research done in Europe, and your brazen and completely inaccurate statements that they have no problems associated with wind turbines, in the gallery not only was Norma Schmidt who had the astonishing courage to stand and speak up because she couldn't take listening to any more, but there was a lot more going on.
For those of you who spoke by voting against the moratorium and those who spoke on behalf of your parties that day I want you to imagine being forced to leave your home.
Imagine that you, your spouse and your children are sick and can no longer sleep and thrive in your own home. Imagine all of the arrangements you have to make. Where do you go? Where do the kids go?
Who'll take the cat and 2 dogs? Will you have to separate them, board them?
How will you pay your mortgage and utilities and still afford another place to rent? Do you have to get a line of credit? Who will even consider giving you one if you're admitting you can't live in your home. It will be now worthless and of no value to the bank.
What do you take with you? Everything?...or just the bare minimum to live on? What about the stuff you have to leave? Will it be safe or will the house be broken into now that it's been abandoned. How can you just leave everything?
What do you say to the kids teachers when they've been uprooted, are having difficulty in school and you can't trust that they will understand because nobody believes it. Will they suspect that you and your spouse are splitting up for other reasons?
How do you protect your children from being ridiculed by other families in the community? How can you do all this and do your job, when you are so deprived of sleep you cannot even form a coherent sentence. Is there a government assistance program that can help you find temporary accomodations, who can help financially and emotionally? Why isn't somebody listening and why isn't your government helpingyou?
On April 28th, 2010 I know that there were at least 15 people present who have already gone through, or are going through these questions right now. These brave people were able to attend this important day by leaving their jobs and travelling for hours by car, bus and GO Transit.
I don't know how many more of them were actually present because I certainly don't know them all, but their presence represented all of the victims in the province and you stood up in front of them and revictimized them over and over again with your inept and unresearched comments. You told the world that all of these people have no credibilty.
Present that day was a teenager, who became so sick that her parents had to send her to live with relatives until they too could find alternate accomodations. They had to find homes for most of their animals, but still return to their abandoned farm daily to care of some they can't get moved yet.
They also have full time jobs. These people were there, listening to you from the gallery. So too was a neighbour of theirs who is too sick to stay in their home and has to sleep elsewhere at night. And a senior citizen who has to stay in a rental house.
There were multiple families who built brand new homes, their dream homes and now they cannot finish them. They have lost the desire and energy to finish their plans. They cannot continue to live there. They are sick. They too were in the gallery.
The dreams and the daily lives of these families are being crushed, and yet these people still made it to this important event at Queens Park on April 28th, 2010. Many in attendance have been forced from their homes and I personally know other families, unable to make it, that have also had to abandon their homes. Who knows for sure how many more are suffering in silence. So tell me, what is the magic number you are all waiting for? How many people?
What a shameful comment that after listening to the passionate plea for acknowledgment and help that came from your gallery, you actually returned to finish your dicrediting and dismissal of adverse health effects and voted against the moratorium. Unbelievable.
At some point the media will get wise to your sly "extensive research" and "best sciences" statements and will start doing their own research and interviews instead of relying on you for comment.
Good luck with that. Barbara Ashbee RR1 Orangeville, Ontario L9W 2Y8
Veteran noise engineer George Kamperman, Board Certified in Noise Control Engineering by the American Institute of Noise Control Engineering, wrote the following commentary after listening to a video clip (above) recorded by Larry Wunsch who lives near the Town of Byron in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin. The closest turbine to his home is 1100 feet away. Wunsch is a firefighter and also happens to be a member of Wisconsin's Wind Siting Council, a fifteen member group who are now at work on creating guidelines for siting turbines in our state.
There is a must-see-and-hear 9 minute DVD by Larry Wunsch at his home in Byron, Wisconsin. Turn up the volume on your computer and listen either through earphones with good uniform base response, or listen from a full frequency range sound system.
You may be shocked by what you hear. The wind turbines make a roaring sound like a jet aircraft. The wind turbines radiate an excessive amount of low frequency energy, and this is the primary reason for our new approach (see How Loud Is Too Loud?) for determining wind turbine setback from dwellings.
Whenever you read about noise levels in the media, the decibel (dB) numbers are frequency weighted (dBA). The term is the “A-weighted” sound level. This frequency weighting discriminates against low frequency sounds, somewhat similar to human hearing response at low sound levels. The wind turbine industry has taken advantage of the phenomenon to show wind turbines produce sound levels no higher than the sound from “a gentle breeze rustling leaves of a tree” or “a small flowing stream” or “the refrigerator in your kitchen,” to cite just some of the examples argued by the wind turbine lobby. These examples are all plausible, and the industry probably has data to show it to be true.
What’s wrong with this picture? The wind industry examples definitely do not sound like the jet engine noise outside the home of Larry Wunsch! The problem is thatwind turbines generate far more low frequency noise than high frequency noise where dBA is most sensitive. This is a dirty little secret the wind turbine industry has been hiding from the public.
To meet this challenge we have added (again, see How Loud Is Too Loud?) a requirement that both dBA and dBC noise data be published by the wind industry. The dBC frequency scale has a flat, uniform response throughout the audible range and thus is a better measure of any noise rich in low frequency sound. We propose wind turbine setbacks must meet both dBA and dBC limits.
I did an actual instrumentation analysis of the Larry Wunsch (YouTube) turbine noise recorded outside his front door. My measured noise characteristics agreed with the manufacturer’s claimed noise emission. Both sets of data show excessive low frequency noise outside the Wunsch home, and they show the dBC (broadband) turbine noise to be 13 dB higher than the dBA (high frequency) turbine noise.
Whenever dBC results exceed dBA results, it is a clear indication that low frequency noise not measured by dBA is in fact present. Noise engineers know this; the general public does not. The industry example of rustling leaves, above, would necessiate dBC one dB ldBAlower than dBA, which is clearly not the case outside Mr. Wunsch’s front door.
Behold the wind industry chicanery (deceit) when it pretends rustling leaves = whispering turbines. Rubbish!
Think of dBA and dBC as tone controls for listening to your favorite music. The treble control being the dBA, and the bass control being the dBC. A uniform random noise is often referred to as white noise. When you reproduce white noise and turn down the treble control (dBA) for reduced highs, and turn up the base control (dBC) for more “boom,” you end up with sound close to the wind turbine noise spectrum.
Or consider this illustration. All propellers produce what’s often called a “haystack” spectrum, where the top of the haystack (peak energy in the spectrum) is determined primarily by the diameter of the propeller circle (twice a blade radius). Think of the whining sound of small model airplanes. Next, think of the engine sound of an ultralight (single-person) aircraft. In this case the engine sound has a lower frequency than the remote-control model airplane. Next, think of the engine sound of a standard, single-engine plane. A Cessna or Piper Cub, let’s say. The engine sound is lower than the ultralight’s. Finally, imagine a B-36 bomber aircraft, where the engine pitch is lower yet.
The point being, as the propeller-sweep-circle-diameter increases, the top of the haystack pitch, or frequency, shifts downward.
Now, graduate to wind turbines. The biggest of them all. Huge propellers sweeping an enormous circle. Propellers so big that the peak of the haystack (peak sound energy) is in the 10 and 20 Hz range–and the peak is no longer audible. Even so, turbine propellers generate plenty of sound energy on the high frequency side, sliding down (increasing frequency) the high frequency side of the haystack, with the result that wind turbine sound spectrum continues to be very audible indeed.
The standard noise meter has had the same two, dBA and dBC, sound weightings since the instrument was invented (around 1940, I believe). The peak in the haystack spectrum for wind turbines is below the frequency range of both human hearing and the range of a standard sound-level meter (10 Hz to 20,000 Hz). In fact, the sound-level meter dBA response becomes increasingly less sensitive to sounds below 500 Hz (2 octaves above middle C on the piano), and has a uniform sensitivity at higher frequencies above 500 Hz. The dBC response, on the other hand, remains uniform thoughout all frequencies above 32 Hz (equivalent to the lowest note on a grand piano) to the upper limit of the instrument (which is 20,000 Hz). The low frequency roll-off below 32 Hz is standardized down to 10 Hz. Thus, this instrument is somewhat useful for near infrasound.
Wind turbines, by the way, do indeed produce infrasound, contrary to misleading statements by some acousticians. Since there is no ANSI (American National Standards Institute) or IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) standard suitable for dealing with wind turbine infrasound, Rick James and I have sidestepped the issue for the time being in our “How To” guide. Rural America will be flooded with wind turbines of questionable value long before a consensus emerges among noise engineers on dealing with wind turbine infrasound. Individuals and communities who are understandably suffering from the infrasound and low frequency noise of turbines cannot wait for ANSI and the IEC to catch up with their dilemma. That’s why my colleague, Rick James, and I have jumped in and made do with the best off-the-shelf technology, instrumentation, and international noise standards currently available. When health and homes are under assault, as the research of Dr. Pierpont and many others makes clear they are, it would be unconscionable for someone with my training to look the other way.
Somehow we need to convince government... that wind turbines must be kept away from people’s homes. That many of these wind farms are in areas of marginal wind energy value makes this even more tragic.
NOTE FROM THE BPWI RESEARCH NERD: For those who had trouble accessing the video of the April 1st Wind Siting Council Meeting, the settings have been changed so they are all now viewable to the public. CLICK HERE for the links.
To address the growing number of complaints and health concerns about adverse health effects from wind farm noise and shadow flicker, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA)and the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA), hired medical doctors, audiologists, and acoustical professionals to review recent literature on the issue. The resulting report, "Wind Turbine Sound and Health Effects" was released in December 2009. Their conclusion?
Other equally qualified medical doctors, audiologists, and acoustical professionals have reviewed the same literature and have come to the opposite conclusion.
ANOTHER NOTE FROM THE BPWI RESEARCH NERD: If you are a Wisconsin resident currently having problems with wind turbine noise or shadow flicker, CLICK HERE to Contact Healthy Wind, Wisconsin
"HWW - Healthy Wind, Wisconsin’s mission is to keep active track of wind-related health issues affecting Wisconsin families. We are committed to assisting residents of Wisconsin who have been impacted by poorly sited wind turbines by processing resident’s complaints and monitoring the progress toward complaint resolution."
The BPRC Research Nerd
